Samaritans Scotland's Spring Update 2023

The West Highlands & Skye project team were delighted to be a part of the Skye Half Marathon Festival on Saturday 10 June in Portree. Our Executive Director, Neil Mathers, and West Highlands & Skye project manager, Fiona Thompson, ran the 10k and both placed in the top 5 of their age categories. The Samaritans Scotland team also met with several external organisations in the local area to help promote our training courses and signposting materials

The Small Talk Saves Lives campaign, in partnership with Network Rail, ran between March & April with events at stations across the country. This included a stall at Edinburgh Haymarket, ahead of Scotland vs Ireland at Murrayfield on Sunday 12 March. The Glasgow branch and Arlene Dickson, our Network Rail Lead for Scotland, also recently held a ‘Pop On, Pop Off’ session on the route around Glasgow & Hamilton stations.

Our Lanarkshire & Inverness branches both recently celebrated their 50th anniversaries. MSPs Monica Lennon & Clare Adamson both celebrated the work of their local Lanarkshire branch through parliamentary motions. The Inverness branch held a celebratory event on Saturday 10 June with local MP, Drew Hendry. Dumfries Branch Director, Ann Stephenson, celebrated Samaritans 70th anniversary at the Chelsea Flower show alongside King Charles and CEO Julie Bentley, after being chosen to attend as an official steward following her own recent 70th birthday.

As part of our work around media guidelines in Scotland, we recently held one of our guidance sessions for parliamentarians with the Scottish Green Party representatives and their staff. Our sessions are useful for anyone talking about suicide, self-harm, and related issues in the public. To date, we have also held sessions with representatives from the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Labour Party.