Understanding Suicide: What Research Tells Us and What We Can Do | Eagles Mediation & Counselling Centre Ltd

The Local Picture

In 2024, provisional data from the Samaritans of Singapore (SOS) recorded 314 suicide deaths, a rate of 5.91 per 100,000 residents. Suicide remained the leading cause of death for young people aged 10 to 29 for the sixth consecutive year. The sharpest shift was in the 30 to 39 age group, where deaths rose from 43 in 2023 to 75 in 2024.

Helpline data points to intersecting pressures in this age group: family difficulties, employment instability, existing mental health challenges. These are not abstract risk factors they are the texture of a life stretched thin in too many directions at once.

Less visible in the statistics is the gap between crisis and care. At polyclinics, only 12.7% of people referred to mental health services after screening positive for depression or anxiety attended. Something is happening between the moment a person is identified as struggling and the moment they walk through a door, and it is worth understanding what.

Why People Still Don’t Reach Out:

The limits of awareness

Singapore has invested significantly in mental health campaigns, and the data suggests partial success: people increasingly view mental health conditions as legitimate illnesses rather than personal failings. But a more unsettling finding complicates this: increased mental health literacy does not reliably reduce stigma. Across student groups, higher mental health knowledge was associated with higher stigma levels. Researchers suggest this may be especially pronounced in collectivist cultures, where greater awareness of mental illness can heighten vigilance for social deviations, making people more, not less, likely to distance themselves from those who struggle.

Knowing more does not automatically make us kinder.

What Helps to Change Minds

The research is consistent on what does work: contact. People who personally knew someone with a mental health condition showed significantly lower stigma than those who did not. Not campaigns, not statistics, but the experience of actually knowing someone.

The implication is simple but uncomfortable: the most powerful stigma-reduction tool is a person being willing to speak openly about their own experience. Every honest conversation in a friendship, family, or workplace does more than any awareness poster.

What Crisis Looks Like from the Inside

Crisis is not simply extreme sadness. It tends to involve a narrowing, where a person loses access to the broader picture of their own life. The people they love, the plans they had. These do not disappear but become genuinely harder to reach. It is less like choosing death and more like being unable, in that moment, to think clearly about living. This is why “just think about your family” can fall flat, not because the person doesn’t care, but because the crisis itself makes those things harder to hold onto.

Research-backed crisis planning works partly by helping someone map out their own warning signs and reasons for living before crisis hits, in a moment of relative clarity, so those things remain accessible when clarity disappears. What the research also consistently shows is that the sense of being accompanied in that process, not just handed in a plan, but helped to build one, matters as much as the plan itself.

What Actually Helps:

It starts with not being forgotten

In the 1970s, psychiatrist Dr Jerome Motto began sending brief letters to patients discharged after a suicidal crisis. The letters made no demands and required no reply. They simply said: I am thinking of you. This became the basis for Caring Contacts, where people at risk receive short, unconditional messages over 12 to 24 months. The research consistently shows it reduces suicidality.

The mechanism is telling it works because it interrupts the feeling of being forgotten. People, after a crisis, are not always looking for solutions, they are looking for evidence that they exist in someone’s mind. Personalisation matters too; messages that reference something the person previously shared feel meaningfully different from generic ones.

The everyday fabric of support

A local study found that people with stronger coping skills and better emotional support networks had significantly lower odds of lifetime suicidality. What this points to is not primarily clinical intervention, but the everyday texture of a person’s relational life.

Emotional support here does not mean advice or having the right answers. What helps most is presence: consistent, non-demanding, without the pressure of fixing anything. The people who make a difference are those who stay, who check in again weeks later, who do not disappear once the immediate crisis has passed.

Conclusion

What the research keeps returning to, across all of these studies, is connection. Connection between people, before and after crisis, and in ordinary life.

Understanding suicide better is not about becoming an expert. It is about being the kind of person who stays in someone’s life consistently enough that they might say something earlier. Crisis is not a choice. Stigma is not shifted by information alone. And the most evidence-backed thing you can offer someone struggling is not advice, it is presence.

That is within reach for most of us.

About the Source

This article draws on insights from an original article on suicide prevention in Singapore by Dr Jonathan Kuek, a mental health researcher specialising in recovery approaches to the understanding and management of mental health conditions. He is also an advocate for stronger regulation of mental health services in Singapore and is passionate about mentoring future mental health professionals.

Read Dr Kuek’s original article here: Suicide Prevention in Singapore

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