Samaritans Scotland and Choose Life

New Government, New Strategy: Towards a Mentally Flourishing Scotland.

Samaritans has been a key partner in the Scottish Government’s Choose Life suicide prevention strategy since November 2004 and this relationship is now an established partnership at strategic level.

Choose Life has been very successful in bringing local and national agencies together to address the issue of suicide and suicide prevention, sparking hundreds of new local initiatives, and new national developments – mainly around communications.

Building on this strategy as we move into the second phase of the National Programme for Improving Mental Wellbeing, a new policy document entitled Towards a Mentally Flourishing Scotland is being produced in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders and will lay down the framework for delivering on emotional health and wellbeing for agencies in all sectors in the future.

Based upon 3 strands of Promotion, Prevention and Support, this framework will encourage further joint working at local level, with appropriate national support to enable local agencies to better support their communities.

Samaritans is part of this new framework and will continue to work with our partners across Scotland to achieve the overall aim of reducing suicide by 20% by 2013.

Our own strategy over the next year will be to make contact and establish relationships with each local authority and health board to ensure that we play our part in achieving this target.