Suicide prevention leader and senior researcher outline why lived experience is vital for national strategy

Australia Broadcast Center

5 days ago

When it comes to suicide prevention, Samantha McIntosh knows more than most.
With a lived experience of suicidality, a long career in suicide prevention and a recent foray into academia on the subject, the Darwin woman has seen multiple facets of what she described as a still highly stigmatised issue.
As opposed to coming from a purely clinical perspective, she says having both personal and professional experience of suicidality — defined as the risk of suicide, indicated by suicidal ideation — can be crucial to engaging with patients and devising solutions.
Ms McIntosh has long advocated for people with lived experience to be central when it comes to drafting strategies and other prevention efforts.
And governments and independent commissions are starting to agree.
According to a June 2025 report from the Productivity Commission, the federal government's National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement is failing to meet the mark.
While the expenditures of governments on mental health has grown by around 30 per cent over the past 10 years, suicide rates over that period of time remain unchanged.
The Productivity Commission recommended greater inclusion of people with lived and living experience of suicidality in drafting and implementing policy.
For Ms McIntosh, the recommendations present a rare opportunity for change.
At the other end of Australia — in the regional Victorian town of Warragul — Anton Isaacs, a senior lecturer at Monash University's School of Rural Health, has been helping bring Ms McIntosh's ideas to life.
"It's rare for somebody to have the kind of expertise that Sam has," he said.
"She has the lived experience of suicidality, she has supported people who have attempted to take their lives, she has been a suicide prevention worker and she worked in leadership positions in programs."
The pair recently co-authored a peer-reviewed perspective paper on challenges to suicide prevention, merging Dr Isaacs's experience of drafting strategies with Ms McIntosh's experience of navigating them.
It focuses on broadly on stigma surrounding suicide, diving specifically into the careless reporting of suicide in news media, access points of care, and a general lack of understanding in the community when it comes to helping at-risk individuals access services.
Dr Isaacs said the work being done is just the beginning, but he noted that integrating lived experience into suicide prevention would require the sector to confront some "basic truths".
"Suicide has traditionally fallen under the remit of mental health services, which are clinical services. In clinical medicine, the focus is to arrive at a diagnosis and treat it," he said.
"In suicide prevention, the focus is not on arriving at a diagnosis and treating, the focus is care and compassion — that is not clinical.
Ms McIntosh agreed, and said the key to effective suicide prevention was a matter of striking the right balance.
"That combination of clinical and lived experience doesn't exist in a lot of places," she said.
Last month, the Mental Health Commission published its National Suicide Prevention Strategy for the next 10 years, which emphasised the inclusion of people with lived experience in prevention efforts.
"People with lived and living experience have the greatest insights into what works, what does not work, and what is missing in suicide prevention," it reads.
But Dr Isaacs and Ms McIntosh explained that such inclusion must be considered and meaningful, rather than a "tick-box exercise".
"If people don't consider lived experience to be central or core to their work, then they don't give it the importance that they need," Dr Isaacs said.
"If that happens, the people with lived experience at the table will feel disillusioned or could be re-traumatised."
Ms McIntosh also said any plan to centralise lived experience in prevention efforts would have to be tailored to the needs of various communities, especially in a unique landscape like the NT.
"The geographical layout of the territory itself poses problems," she said
"We know that there's workforce challenges across the [NT] in all sectors and being able to support the diversity of the territory and communities is also something that we face."
While the obstacles to change are numerous, she said there was plenty of support across the sector to make lived experiences central to new prevention strategies.
"I think that they would be more successful, I think that they would be more achievable, and I think you would have higher client rates," Ms McIntosh said.