Voices of experience and hope soar in a song to prevent suicide

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or be in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

When Jo Lambert first found out that one of her loved ones was feeling suicidal, she felt terrified.

“I was so panicked by the grief I might experience if my loved one died that it prevented me from giving my loved one what I needed [to],” says Lambert, 54, who lives in London.

That was back in 2017. Over time, through trial and error, Lambert says, she learned she had to put her own feelings aside in the moment and focus on the person in front of her. “As soon as I detached myself from the outcome, I made this about the person in the crisis — fully. That was when I got the hang of it.”

From poem to film

As Lambert matured in her role as a caregiver for someone with active suicidality, she made a “promise to the universe” that she would teach others what she was learning “so that people are not powerless watching a loved one suffer like this.”

That opportunity came in 2023, when she teamed up with five other people. All had lived through an experience of suicidality. One of them was grieving a suicide death; the rest had struggled with suicidal thoughts themselves. They took their collective experiences and made a short film about suicide prevention, commissioned by a suicide prevention program in the U.K.

They used a poem Lambert had written called “Hold the Hope“ to narrate the film and gave the movie the same title. “Will you hold the hope for me? I feel I’ve lost my way. I need you to be strong for me. And help me find the strength to stay,” Lambert says, reciting the poem during our Zoom call.

Line after line, the poem asks for emotional safety in the face of intense despair and suicidal feelings.

Can you be strong enough
Stay by my side for long enough
Will you keep trying till you’ve done enough
So I abandon what I’ve planned
 
Hold this space for me
Accept my torment, stay alongside
Hide your discomfort
When I mention thoughts of suicide
 
Keep safe this place for me
Hold my gaze, don’t look away
Meet my hurt head on
Don’t leap back in alarm
Stay focused, steady, calm

It calls for the person in the supportive role to “connect, reflect and validate” the feelings of the person in crisis. It reminds people that individuals in suicidal crisis have often been led to that point by past experiences, perhaps involving trauma and hardships, and that they need someone else to remind them of their own resilience.

“These [are] the voices of those who regularly return to active suicidality and are surviving it because of the compassion of others,” Lambert says. Her poem explains to people what that compassion can look like. “It’s in a form that’s easy to remember, and it tells people, ‘This is what someone who’s been there and who survived needs.'”

The filmmakers show some of those individuals in various settings: at a train station, in a room or sitting on a park bench. Their silent faces and the words of the poem — recited by British spoken-word artist George the Poet — describe the intense isolation and despair experienced by people in suicidal crisis, as well as their need for connection and emotional support from others. And the film reminds people that the right support can give them hope for their future.

A way to fight stigma

Lambert now works for a regional National Health Service Mental Health Trust coordinating suicide prevention training sessions for health care providers, first responders, schools, volunteers and institutions. In 2024, the South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust, the leading provider of mental health services in southwest London, began using the film as part of its suicide prevention awareness training sessions.

Lambert and her boss, Justine Trippier, a psychiatric nurse, often do these training sessions together. And they screen the film for the attendees.

Trippier, who has worked with people with lived experience of mental illness, says sharing those voices can help battle stigma around suicide: “I believe if we hear from the people directly, then that can change attitudes and create compassion in people.”

Using the film in her training has made the sessions more engaging, she adds. “We see changing compassion, a change in reflection levels, the change in people being awake.”

And the rawness of emotions expressed in the film and Lambert’s poem make attendees more open to sharing their own experiences, she adds. Sometimes, it’s a participant with their own loved one who’s suicidal. At other times, it’s a health care worker who is struggling to cope with the loss of a patient to suicide.

Suicide prevention as “everyone’s business” 

This year, Lambert, who says she’d always heard the poem as a song, worked with the composer Joe Waymouth to bring that song to life. “It’s a song that grounded me and helped me survive through my loved one’s crises,” she explains.

She recruited a group of volunteer singers — students, health care workers from NHS Mental Health Trust in southwest London, including Trippier, and some with lived experience of suicidality — and recorded the song in a church.

Lambert and Trippier now want to use the song to take their message on suicide prevention to more people.

Lambert notes that the NHS Mental Health Trust’s suicide prevention strategy says: “We’ve got to make suicide prevention and awareness everyone’s business. Now, the key question is how?”

Her own experience brought her to the arts. “The reason we do it in the arts is we put it in the mainstream,” she says. And she wants to use the song to reach different audiences. She has worked with a dancer to create a freestyle dance to the song that they have shared on YouTube. And Lambert also wants to do a hip-hop version soon.

Lambert adds that on their own, her film and song aren’t enough to teach people about how to support a loved one in crisis. “It needs to be made clear this is not a substitute for statutory training,” says Lambert, referring to the more formal training that Trippier and other professionals provide. “We’re just saying this is what helped a group of people who’ve survived. This is what made the difference. And we are just offering this as an alongside to what’s already out there.”

As she knows well from her own experience, the work of caring for a person with suicidality can be exhausting.

“This is not a quick conversation where everything’s fine now,” she says. “In my lived experience, sometimes it took 16 hours without a break. And then I would know that the moment’s passed — my loved one’s safe now.”

But for some, these crises can go on for days, months or years, she says, and some people may cycle in and out of periods of suicidal crises.

When exhaustion would hit her, Lambert says, she would visualize that her loved one had accidentally fallen down a cliff.

“I used to imagine I’ve got to keep pulling, pulling, pulling, until they can climb up themselves,” says Lambert. “And I used to say, ‘I’m going to hold the hope for you until you can do it.'”

Familiar themes

The lessons in the song are similar to what suicide prevention experts in the U.S. give to health care workers and others caring for suicidal individuals.

“We give the advice, first and foremost, when you’re sitting with somebody who’s struggling with suicidal thoughts is to not panic,” says psychologist Ursula Whiteside, who runs Now Matters Now, a nonprofit working on suicide prevention in Washington state.

“Then secondarily to be present with that person,” explains Whiteside, “to be in the room with them as much as possible.”

Whiteside says Lambert’s song is different from anything else she has seen or heard in the suicide prevention field. The fact that the song is sung by a choir in a church elevates the topic, she adds.

“It seems like it’s almost showing a type of recognition and respect for the experience that people have that is so painful and such a huge decision — that feels very powerful.”

She was moved by the song, says Whiteside, both as a health care provider and as someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts.

“What’s really impressive about this is that it is people saying what would be helpful” to the person in crisis, she says. “Like, ‘This is what I want you to do.’ And for so long, that side of things has been left out, not considered, not asked.”

The value of a lived experience

Increasingly, health care workers and suicide prevention experts are realizing the importance of bringing in the voices of people with lived experience of suicidality. And research finds that highlighting the experiences of those who have survived suicidality by seeking help can play a big role in preventing others from attempting suicide.

“When I was listening to this [song], I kept coming back to the fact that there are so many times that people survive,” says Whiteside. As the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline notes on its website, for every person who dies by suicide, more than 300 people seriously consider suicide but don’t end their lives.

And Lambert’s song is a good reminder, says Whiteside, that with the right help, people can and do choose life despite feeling suicidal.