We conducted two secondary data analysis projects and a review.
Guidance review
What guidance is available to schools and youth organisations to support young people?
We wanted to find out what guidance is freely available to help education and youth organisations support young people with self-harm and suicide.
We reviewed the content of the guidance we found and sorted this into categories. We worked with stakeholders and PPIE groups to rate the importance of different categories and identify any gaps in the available guidance, which will help to develop future resources.
You can read our review of the guidance as an open-access article here.
To illustrate findings from the guidance review, we worked closely with our adult and young people public involvement groups and teamed up with More than Minutes to produce a creative visual to summarise what exists in current guidance, what our advisory groups feel is currently missing, and in what ways future self-harm and suicide guidance could be improved. Our young person’s advisory group (YPAG) were closely involved with the development of the infographic advising us on imagery to use, language to avoid and colour preferences.
Key recommendations for future guidance included:
- more guidance specifically for youth organisations (we found lots for schools)
- more tailored guidance for vulnerable groups (e.g. LGBTQ+ or SEND)
- more guidance for how organisations can support young people after a death by suicide.
Future guidance should also be co-produced with young people and staff to ensure that key topics identified as important to these groups are not missed.
Secondary data analysis
Who do young people talk to about self-harm and suicide?
We searched academic databases for published research exploring who young people talk to about self-harm and suicide. We found a total of 2090 published articles on this topic. Through screening these articles for relevance and eligibility we identified 44 papers for inclusion in our analysis. We extracted information from the 44 papers about the sample of participants, methods, and results about who young people spoke to about self-harm and suicide. All 44 papers were rated for quality using a checklist. We are currently working to analyse these findings and write them up for dissemination.
How can staff members talk to young people about self-harm and suicide?
We searched academic databases for published systematic reviews examining techniques that can be used in schools to decrease rates of self-harm and suicide, or suicidal ideation – there were a total of 1117 reviews identified, of which we decided 84 were relevant. We then extracted 240 original papers from these reviews if they fit our criteria. We are currently screening these papers to include in our analysis. Next, we extracted information from the papers about the sample of participants, methods, and results about whether using transparent or opaque language makes a difference to the effectiveness of techniques that can be used in schools. We hope that this will help advise staff about what skills are best to use when discussing self-harm, suicide, and suicidal ideation with students.
Photo 1 by cottonbro studio; Photo 2 by Monstera Production