Associated organisationsCanterbury Christ Church University · University of Edinburgh · University of LincolnEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£6.0M
PeriodSept 2024 — Aug 2031
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Most suicide prevention focuses on stopping someone from dying in a crisis, but this project asks a different question: what makes a life worth living in the first place. The problem is that current approaches target acute, individualised intervention—preventing a death—rather than building the social, political, and environmental conditions that sustain people over time. People with lived experience of suicide are rarely in leadership roles, and insights from social sciences and humanities are sidelined, limiting innovation. This project fills that gap by co-producing knowledge with those who have been through suicidal crises, treating their expertise as central rather than optional. If successful, this could shift suicide prevention from a reactive emergency service to a proactive effort to shape the contexts—housing, employment, community, policy—that make life feel liveable. That change would ripple through public health infrastructure, mental health commissioning, and local government planning, altering how resources are allocated and how support is designed. It would not replace crisis care, but it would transform the system that crisis care sits inside.
View original technical description
‘Discovering Liveability: Co-Producing Alternatives to Suicide Prevention’ responds to growing awareness of gaps in existing approaches to suicide prevention. Challenges have been raised regarding a focus on acute, individualised crisis intervention, or prevention of deaths by suicide, rather than a potentially transformative focus on enhancing contexts for life, or ‘liveability’. It is also increasingly recognised both that suicide cannot be effectively responded to without the inclusion and leadership of those with lived experience of suicide, and that improved responses require a transformation in approaches to suicide research, to include diverse disciplinary expertise. Crucially, social sciences and humanities, and qualitative methodologies, are not successfully integrated, hampering progress and limiting opportunities for innovation. Discovering Liveability will: conduct a wide-ranging, qualitatively-driven and co-produced inquiry into the possibilities of ‘liveability’ as a focus for suicide prevention; establish, grow and critically evaluate approaches centring lived and living experiences of suicide; and interrogate the role of politics and policies in shaping the possibilities for ‘liveability’. Discovering Liveability will significantly accelerate the radical transformation of suicide research, practice and policy, towards interdisciplinary, evidence-based and co-produced knowledge that foregrounds the understanding and sustenance of contexts that promote liveable lives.
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