My father died from a silent killer – 32 years later we still don’t talk about it enough | United Kingdom | News

A mental health activist whose father committed suicide when she was in her early 20s says we still haven’t “changed course” enough on suicide.

Suicide rates in England and Wales are now at their highest level in more than 20 years and one in five people will have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime.

And suicide prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) claims that every day in the UK 18 people lose their lives to suicide.

Jenny Wooldridge’s father, Brian, was one of those people in June 1992. And 32 years later, she says the UK is still not talking about suicide in the way it should to prevent deaths.

Mrs Wooldridge, from Bristol, said: “When it first happened I didn’t talk about it because you’re always worried about saying the wrong thing, and also people go crazy, and you also don’t want to burden people with your own story. .”

She added: “When I talk about this, people want to apologize and that’s great, but it’s like I’m telling you because I want it to be a positive story.

“I’m not telling you to feel sorry for me, I want this to be positive, and because of my life path, years ago, when my father died, you know, people didn’t even talk about it. .

“You go back about a decade later and statistically it still hasn’t changed from when my father died. Then you come back 32 years later and you’re still reading that you’re the biggest killer of men under 50.

“It’s still the biggest cause of death for young adults, and you think, so where are we on the scale of changing the dial?

“My father always told me: if you can change one person’s life, it’s worth it. So when I got involved with Calm, I think if one person, if I can get one person to call the Calm hotline, then it will be worth it for my dad.

Speaking on World Mental Health Day, the 53-year-old says that, at age 80, she wants people to be able to talk about suicide and mental health as freely as they do cancer.

She added: “My mom still has a hard time talking about it, because of the stigma around suicide, whereas I’ve definitely made an active choice with my youth work and my community work to talk about it.

“Now I have children and they know how their grandfather died. He was a big part of my life and I want that to live on.

“He was a good man who wasn’t going to be the person you looked at and said, oh yeah, this is going to happen to you.

“I think that’s the key. It’s like the later event, when you see these endless reports of young people taking their own life, or a 50-year-old man taking his own life, and you think, we didn’t know, and it’s like, well, no, You don’t know, you don’t know.

Mrs Wooldridge’s father would have turned 90 this year, so to mark the occasion she is running three fundraisers to raise money for Calm.

All the money she raises will go towards the charity’s work to prevent suicide, which includes a hotline and online resources.

She added: “I think with my dad I’m so desperate for his death to mean something to others.

“That was the end for him, but if you can, if you have the tools. That’s why CALM is so great, because they have features that help you speak and they have ways to access them that are easy, like running, listening to music and, you know, normal stuff.

“The tools on the CALM website are phenomenal. I don’t know if I want to say ‘normalize,’ but it makes it accessible.”

And funds from the latest Omaze Million Pound House draw will go to CALM – with a house in Devon worth more than £2 million up for grabs, along with £250,000 in cash. Entries for the prize draw are available at https://omaze.co.uk/pages/devon-iii and close at midnight on October 27th.

CALM support is available on their Calmzone website and also by calling their helpline on 0800 585858.

Samaritans can be contacted 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

If you need an answer right away, it’s best to give them a call. You can contact them by calling 116 123, sending an email [email protected] or visiting www.samaritanos.org.