“Please can we work together to understand our picture of CYP suicide?”
This was the crucial question raised in our Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton Children’s Mental Health Systems leaders meeting in January 2020 as we planned out our shared work for the next two years. All partners agreed and we got underway with planning and undertaking a detailed analysis of 0-18 deaths (suspected suicides) in the preceding 5 year period. Little did we know that we were weeks away from Wave 1 COVID-19 lockdown and that very quickly the analysis extended across other parts of the South East.

We refined a partnership methodology, thanks to proactive support from our Public Health and Police leaders, mental health and safeguarding partners. We extended our analyses to consider all 0-25 confirmed/suspected suicides in the previous 5 years in several different sub-regions in the South East and started to build a composite picture together. We asked careful questions about the lives; circumstances; experiences (adversity and trauma); demographics; experience of school, community and home; and the stories of our children. We checked and balanced our findings with partners along the way, often providing richer intelligence or a fuller picture as we went. When the analyses were nearing completion, we sat behind the scenes in the South East NHSE/I CYP Mental Health team and considered the overall picture, specifically where the analyses were similar and where they differed.

And this report summarises the results of this work.

Published: January 2021