Meeting of the Parliament 21 November 2017
I am pleased that we have an opportunity today to discuss suicide and its prevention in Scotland. The Scottish Government attaches the utmost priority to this high-profile area.
Any death by suicide is a tragedy, with a deeply distressing impact on the families and friends left behind. I have met quite a number of people who have been bereaved by suicide. Unless we have been in that situation, we cannot understand fully what such a loss feels like, but we can all appreciate the extremely upsetting and traumatic effect of losing a loved one in this tragic way. Out of respect for those who have been bereaved, I hope that we can speak in general terms today, rather than about specific cases.
Suicide is an extremely complex phenomenon, with a wide range of determinant factors, including mental illness, being male, unstable relationships, deprivation, adverse life events, gender issues, substance misuse and contact with the criminal justice system. There is rarely any single identifiable causal factor related to individual deaths by suicide. That makes it extremely challenging to identify in advance the risk of any individual dying by suicide.
Over the past decade, there has been a 17 per cent reduction in the rate of suicide in Scotland.