TIME TO COUNT: SUPPORTING CHILDREN AFTER A PARENT DIES BY SUICIDE

CHURCHILL FELLOWSHIP REPORT BY ANNA WARDLEY

Thousands of children lose a parent to suicide every year in the UK. We don’t know exactly how many, as unlike in some other countries, nobody counts them. This report is committed to making sure every single one of these children counts.

Nobody knows how many children lose a parent to suicide in the UK. That’s because they are not counted so there are no statistics available. We do know that 6,507 people took their own lives in the UK in 2018 according to the Office for National Statistics so we can only guess that many thousands of children are bereaved by parental suicide each year. The highest rate was for men aged 45 to 49, and it’s likely that many of them would have been parents to children and young people under the age of 25. We need to quantify this in order to catalyse change.