Discovering Liveability: Co-producing alternatives to suicide prevention

‘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.