Welsh Government’s Suicide and self-harm draft strategy: our response
We welcome this strategy warmly, and we are clear that if delivered, particularly the much-needed progress on data collection and wider societal prevention and education, it will be significant difference to the lives of people in distress.
See also: our response to the Draft Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy
Our response to the consultation is shorter, because much of what we would want to contribute to this, has already been included in the existing consultation response for the draft mental health and wellbeing consultation.
We welcome this strategy warmly, and we are clear that if delivered, particularly the much-needed progress on data collection and wider societal prevention and education, it will be significant difference to the lives of people in distress.
However, our significant contribution to this, is to call for a commitment to merge this and the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy, starting with a merging of delivery plans and delivery scrutiny procedures), over the next ten years, so that we do not risk diverging our approaches to mental health and suicide.
Both policies need to be trauma-informed, community-based, and build on the principles espoused by the recent WHO/UN guidance on mental health legislation and practice, which includes clear evidence about the need to move to a social determinant understanding of mental health, as well as the need to shift to a least-restrictive, rights-based, informed-consent system
Making Wales a happier, healthier, safer place to live.
We hope our call to commit to merging the strategies is acted on. The risk, otherwise, is both the chance of divergence, but also the creation of additional bureaucracy and multiple competing sets of outcomes and targets. If that happens, it will put at risk the impact of both strategies.
Overall, however, we agree with the actions committed to, and welcome the progress made by Welsh Government. This strategy provides a potential opportunity to tackle the serious issues of suicide and self-harm. We are really pleased to see a significant focus placed on gathering accurate data, and on wider prevention and training (although we would want to see the inclusion of the third sector, and the importance of wider community engagement expanded on), and we look forward to playing what part we can, in making Wales a happier, healthier, and safer place to live.
