In the UK, there are five million family caregivers, and their unpaid labour contribute a staggering £445 million to the economy every day – that’s £162 billion per year. Research shows as many as one in five children and young people are young carers with a further 600,000 hidden young carers not receiving any support.
Earlier this year Grassroots teamed up with accomplished director Martin Percy to make a film about suicide prevention. The film presents an unfolding conversation between two flatmates, Chris and Jason.
June 21st 2015 Father’s Day. A beautiful sunny day full of promise. Old friends arrive for lunch. We eat good food and drink wine.
Last month we delivered a Real Talk suicide prevention workshop at the Sea View Centre in Hastings. We ran the session for 15 community members, enabling them to have open and honest conversations about suicide.
For me, a turning point was when I realised that the secret that I had held so buried and precious for so long, had slowly reached the place where I now both wanted and needed to acknowledge and talk about it.
For some reason, people think you can’t talk about suicide unless you’ve felt suicidal. Similarly, there is huge misconception (quite often) that if anyone speaks about suicide, they themselves are suicidal…
Suicide wasn’t something I’d been directly exposed to until a close friend of mine told me he’d tried to take his own life.
My background around my own experiences of suicide left me with a keen interest in the topic and desire to be able to help people who were in a similar position to me.
Research shows that 72% of people who die by suicide do not engage with traditional support services such as their GP or mental health services (1). So Grassroots are reaching out to the community to take action against suicide.
Who is Real Talk for? All kinds of people and from all sorts of backgrounds. Everyone is welcome.
The Stay Alive app is a free to download suicide prevention tool, designed to help people thinking about suicide and those concerned about someone else.
© 2024 Grassroots Suicide Prevention, registered charity number 1149873 and a company limited by guarantee 5687263