After World Suicide Prevention Day, What?

I have posted that graphic and held the webinar. I am not standing outside this one.

And the webinar is not the problem. The webinar and posts are fine. The problem is that in most organisations, they are the strategy.

The people this is about are at work

In 2022, 500 people in Ireland died by suicide. Of those, 389 were men. The crude rate was 15.2 per 100,000 for men and 4.2 for women. Those are CSO figures, and the CSO is careful to note that late registrations make year-on-year comparison difficult, because deaths referred to a coroner are registered well after the usual three months.

The longer trend is genuinely good, and it is worth saying so. The rate has fallen by around a third since 2000. The preliminary figure for 2023 was 302, the lowest in over twenty years, although preliminary figures rise as inquests conclude, so nobody should bank it yet.

Here is the number I keep coming back to. In 2022, the single age group with the highest number of deaths was 40 to 44. Sixty-three people.

That is not the edge of working life. That is the middle of it. A mortgage, kids, a manager, a workload, a payslip. Most of those people had somewhere to be on a Monday morning.

Where workplaces sit in the national plan

Ireland published a new ten-year strategy on 27 May this year. Connecting for Life 2026 to 2035 sets a target of reducing the suicide rate to 7 per 100,000 or below by 2035, and it was shaped by close to 1,900 public submissions. It is a serious document.

Workplaces are in it. Occupational risk is listed as a societal-level risk factor. And the strategy calls for suicide prevention to be incorporated into Healthy Ireland programmes across a list of settings that includes workplaces, alongside sporting bodies, schools, college campuses, farming communities and prisons.

My view, and I am flagging it as opinion, is that workplaces are named in that strategy but not tasked by it. If you are an employer waiting to be told precisely what your part is, you will be waiting a long time. I do not think that is a reason to do nothing. I think it is the gap.

Work is not only where people are. It is one of the things acting on them.

The strongest recent evidence on this comes from France. Isabelle Niedhammer and colleagues published an analysis in the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2024 using the national SUMER survey: 25,977 employees, nationally representative. Three and a half per cent reported suicidal ideation.

They then looked at which working conditions were associated with it. Workplace bullying carried the largest association of anything measured, with an odds ratio of 2.46. Low reward came in at 2.26. Low esteem, 1.91. Job insecurity, 1.84. High psychological demands, 1.65. Work-family conflict, 1.55. Ethical conflict, where people are asked to do things that clash with their own standards, 1.45.

The study is cross-sectional, so it shows association rather than cause, and suicide is never the product of one thing. That caveat matters.

But read the list back slowly. Being bullied. Effort that goes unrewarded. Being made to feel you do not count. Not knowing if the job is there next year. Being asked to do things you believe are wrong.

None of those are clinical categories. That is a description of ordinary management.

And risk does not sit where you would guess

The most detailed occupational breakdown I could find is now a decade old, from the Office for National Statistics, covering 13,232 suicides in England between 2011 and 2015. It is English data, and I found no Irish direct equivalent.

Among men, construction labourers were at 3.7 times the national average. Roofers, tilers and slaters, 2.7 times. Plasterers, painters and decorators, roughly double. Male care workers, close to twice. Among women, care workers were 70% above average, and artistic and media occupations 69% above.

Corporate managers and directors were more than 70% below the national average, for both men and women.

Sit with that last line for a moment. Risk is not spread evenly through an organisation, and it does not follow the org chart in the direction most people assume. It tends to sit furthest away from the room where the wellbeing strategy gets rubber stamped.

What actually moves the number

Here I have to be honest about the state of the evidence.

A 2024 scoping review by Hallett and colleagues in PLOS One pulled together 46 papers covering 36 workplace suicide prevention interventions. Of the twenty that measured outcomes, most reported positive results. Of the ten that looked at suicide rates directly, nine found a decrease and seven of those reached statistical significance.

The same review is blunt about the limits. There are no randomised controlled trials. Most studies are before-and-after designs. Suicide is rare even in high-risk industries, so the sample sizes you would need to prove anything definitively are enormous.

The manager layer is where the evidence is better. In 2017 Milligan-Saville and colleagues published a cluster randomised controlled trial in The Lancet Psychiatry with the New South Wales Fire and Rescue service. Managers received four hours of mental health training. Work-related sick leave fell in the trained group at follow-up and rose in the control group.

Four hours. Not a culture programme. Not a rebrand. Four hours.

The twenty-nine per cent

The CIPD surveyed 1,101 organisations through YouGov in March and April 2025 for its Health and Wellbeing at Work report.

Twenty-nine per cent train line managers to support people with mental ill health.

In organisations that do train them, 73% say managers are confident having sensitive conversations and pointing people towards proper help. In organisations that do not, it is 57%.

So we have a fair idea of what closes the gap. It is cheap, in some cases free, and roughly seven organisations in ten are not doing it.

Why it stops at signposting

What follows is my read rather than a research finding.

Signposting is safe. A phone number is a boundary as much as it is a bridge. Once it has been handed over, the problem has been handed over with it, and nobody has had to sit in a difficult conversation.

Managers are frightened of doing harm. The belief that asking someone directly might put the idea in their head is the single most common thing I hear when this comes up. It is also precisely what the training exists to correct, which is an argument for doing the training.

And the day itself makes it feel finished. Awareness days do real work. They also close a subject as efficiently as they open it. The tenth of September supplies an answer to “are we doing anything about this?”, and that answer holds for another twelve months.

What taking it seriously looks like

Four things, all of them inside a wellbeing team’s reach.

Train the managers, properly. The HSE’s National Office for Suicide Prevention runs Let’s Talk About Suicide online, self-paced, 60 to 90 minutes, free, open to anyone over 18. safeTALK is a half day. ASIST is two days. Understanding Self-harm is one day. All free, all running nationally. There is no budget argument here, only a priority one.

Treat bullying and chronic overload as risk. On the SUMER data, bullying carried the largest association of any exposure measured. If your dignity at work process takes months, and most of them do, that is not only a legal exposure.

Find out where your risk actually sits. Lone workers, shift workers, front-line contact roles, trades, people working through a redundancy process, people dealing with a major life issue. Wellbeing supports and programmes have a habit of mapping neatly onto the people who are easiest to reach.

Decide now what happens afterwards. Most organisations have no plan for the first 48 hours after a death by suicide and end up improvising at the worst possible moment. Postvention guidance exists, from the HSE, and from Samaritans. September is the month to read it. The day itself is not.

The eleventh

None of this makes an employer responsible for preventing every crisis. People arrive at work carrying things no organisation put there.

But somewhere between “responsible for everything” and “a phone number on the intranet” there is a great deal of ground, and most organisations are not standing on any of it.

The posts, the webinars are not the problem.

The eleventh of September is.

What I’m reading this month

My copy of Honestly Man by Andrew Pain arrived this week and I’m looking forward to reading this one. I also just finished reading a brilliant book called Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, a fascinating story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. I highly recommend this one.

Stat of the month

In 2022, the age group with the highest number of suicide deaths in Ireland was 40 to 44. Sixty-three people. Every one of them of working age. (CSO, Suicide Statistics 2022)

One thing to try this week

Do the HSE’s Let’s Talk About Suicide training. It is online, self-paced, takes 60 to 90 minutes, and costs nothing. If you manage people, that is a better use of an hour and a half this month than anything you will read about suicide prevention, including this. traininghub.nosp.ie