I watch a programme called Suicide and Me, by the musician Professor Green, aka Stephen Manderson, who lost his father to suicide at a young age.
It features a tiny place in north London, a sanctuary that has an exceptionally high success rate at helping people who are on the verge of suicide. A person can stay there for five days, and once they leave, they can’t return. But for many people, once is enough. It has saved over a thousand lives, and it currently is the only one of its kind in Britain.
I found Maytree. Its director, Natalie, and I are sitting in a restaurant near my office. I stir my coffee, and I ask her about prevention.
Like Mr B, she’s of the firm belief that unless we start teaching children about emotional intelligence, we are simply firefighting.
Maytree have done something very clever: they have put content on their website that means when someone Googles ‘want to kill myself’, their site comes up at the top of the search, which is literally a lifeline to someone at the end of their road.
Although there are people who have come to Natalie’s door because they’ve suffered horrific childhood abuse or have severe mental illness, there are also those with ‘perfectly normal upbringings’ who have found themselves in a perfect storm. One such person, who came to them after searching for ways to kill himself, was an ex-serviceman who’d been in Afghanistan.
‘He had seen things that you shouldn’t see,’ Natalie said. ‘He came back and was discharged, so he’d lost his sense of purpose, but also structure. And that obviously impacted on his mental wellbeing and relationship with his wife. His wife went and had an affair, they got divorced, that was ugly and there were children involved.
‘So there was this knock-on effect and he just couldn’t cope any more. He didn’t want to die; he just couldn’t see how he could continue with his life.’
The structure of Maytree is remarkably simple. Its job is to provide a safe, calm space where people won’t be judged. It is built utterly on trust, from the moment they call to the moment they leave.
‘It’s also a model delivered by volunteers,’ said Natalie. ‘So let’s say within the NHS you are depressed and you get assigned a psychiatrist. What if you don’t connect with that psychiatrist, what if there is no trust? How do you expect that relationship to evolve into something supportive and fruitful?
‘So in Maytree, a guest will see, in one day, about twelve different volunteers. Out of those, that individual will connect with at least one or two of them. And the feedback we get from guests is that the fact that someone they’ve never met before is willing to give up their time for nothing and spend it with [them] reinstates that they are worth it. Because a lot of the time, that individual’s self-esteem, by the time they come to us, is flat on the floor.
‘That a complete stranger is willing to sit with them, and not judge or try to change or fix their darkest thoughts and feelings – it plants the seeds of what was maybe there before. Which is: I am worth the time, I am worth fighting for. I am worth spending time with. And that is the seed of hope.’
Natalie can’t read my mind. But I am overcome at the work she does, and I think of all of those families who still have their loved ones because of her and Maytree.
Here is a model that works. And so I pledge that I will do whatever I can to help her.
I finally feel like Rob’s legacy is taking shape.