Suicide Prevention Scotland annual report published

Our annual report has today been published by the Scottish Government.

It covers the period from 01 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

Below you can read the executive summary, which sets out much of what we've achieved in a busy twelve month period.

Read the full report here, or download our summary of key achievements, here.

Over the last 12 months, our community of people and organisations have worked collaboratively across the Creating Hope Together delivery plan.

Our annual report reflects on the extensive programme of activity and some of the key achievements during 2024-25.

Everything we’ve developed has been built using the principles of Time Space Compassion.

We’ve ensured the that lived and living experience has been involved across every workstream. That, combined with professional and academic expertise ensures we can create good policy and practice.

We’ve also proactively engaged a broad range of different groups across society, representing different, often marginalised communities.

For example, we commissioned the Scottish Community Development Centre to support four community-based organisations to undertake Community Led Action Research (CLAR).

These organisations support people who experience stigma, discrimination, inequalities and the socio-economic determinants of suicide. This includes refugees and people seeking asylum, those experiencing poor mental health, or people who may be experiencing poverty.

We’ve been working with three NHS Boards who are implementing effective risk management alongside family and carer involvement in mental health care. This is in line with the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health (NCISH) recommendations for safer mental health services.

Connecting with others working in suicide prevention is vital, as is offering new learning opportunities.

We’ve delivered a range of workshops and webinars. Our session looking at suicidal risk for neurodiverse people was attended by over 600 delegates.

Our Gathering Hope all day event involved around 70 different third sector organisations. This well attended event focused on funding, evaluation, learning & development and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ young people.

A range of other workshop activities provided colleagues with the opportunity to explore suicide prevention relating to, gender based violence, neurodiversity, people seeking asylum and refugees, LGBTQ+ communities, learning resources, men, communities, homelessness and bereavement by suicide.

To mark World Suicide Prevention Day, we also held our first Side By Side After Suicide event for people bereaved by suicide. Around 80 people attended, telling us they valued the opportunity to come together with others who had experienced suicide bereavement in a caring and compassionate environment.

The value of relationships is vital in our work.

We’ve provided practical support to local Suicide Prevention Leads, including opportunities to come together, learn and connect as well as engage with the wider ‘national’ Suicide Prevention Scotland team. We also offered a monthly drop-in session with the National Delivery Lead, published a bi-monthly newsletter and provided a Knowledge Hub page.

More widely, we’ve developed relationships with a number of new organisations, who have joined our wider Suicide Prevention Network. Many of these groups work with people who experience stigma, discrimination, inequalities and the social-economic determinants of suicide.

As well as involvement across our work, our Academic Advisory Group specifically published reviews aimed at understanding help seeking and help giving, policy interventions to address social determinants of suicide, and preventing suicide by two specific means.

Data is critical in our work. An ethnicity database will be linked to Scottish Suicide Information Database (ScotSID) to enable an extra layer of inequalities analysis.

We’ve also been mapping postcode data, allowing us to identify potential relationships between deprivation and suicide rates. The implementation of suicide reviews with five local authorities will also help increase our understanding of the factors which contribute to suicide.

Young people are central to our work.

Through the Youth Advisory Group and Participation Network we’ve explored future priorities. Some of these include advocating for suicide prevention to be included in the whole school approach to mental health; the development of a toolkit to support parents and peers to have conversations with young people about suicide; and the establishment of a Universities and Colleges Network, enabling sharing and peer support across the sector.

We also developed a new public awareness campaigns framework, part of restructuring our approach to United to Prevent Suicide. The new campaign launched at the start of the following financial year, with information to follow in the 2025-26 annual report.

The Suicide Prevention Scotland community is working tirelessly to ensure no suicide ever be inevitable. There is always more work to do, because until everyone is safe, we must continue our efforts.

As you will read in this year’s annual report, these are substantial.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please reach out for help, speak to someone you trust or call one of these helplines:

• Samaritans 116 123 or use the online chat at samaritans.org

• Breathing Space 0800 83 85 87

• NHS 24 mental health hub on 111

If you are ever in immediate danger or have the means to cause yourself harm, you should dial 999 and request an ambulance.