Working creatively with community groups to understand the politics of UK suicide prevention

Background: Suicide prevention policies are considered the cornerstone of national responses to deaths by suicide. In the UK, such policies have been constructed with a collaborative view in mind, organised around a central
principle that suicide prevention is everyone's business: but what does the public, who such policies hope to take an active role in suicide prevention, think about this?
Methods: Our project critically analysed eight suicide prevention policies in use between 2009 and 2019, as well as the political debates mentioning suicide in the four parliaments and assemblies in the same time period. We held creative workshops with seven community groups, in order to further explore, deliberate and discuss our findings. These collaborative spaces extended our initial analyses, and formed vital spaces in which participants could 'speak back' to policies and politicians.
Findings: Although suicide prevention policies described an aim to facilitate collaborative partnerships between policy-makers, politicians, practitioners and the public, this was critiqued by participants who suggested that opportunities for genuine collaboration were limited. Instead, gestures towards sharing prevention with community partners could be interpreted as an abdication of responsibility from those in power, increasing the burden placed on community groups and services without a corresponding increase in resourcing, and that was particularly the case amongst minoritised communities and group identified as at increased risk of suicide.
Discussion: The balance between community-led suicide prevention and centralised government support provision must be carefully negotiated to prevent the over-burdening of already extremely stretched community
groups and services.