Challenging suicide stigma in the Jewish community
In this latest blog we hear from Philippa Carr, senior mental health education and suicide prevention manager at Jami (part of Jewish Care), about how Jami are tackling suicide stigma within the Jewish community.
Jami is a mental health service that is part of Jewish Care. We provide specialist services to the community through a multi-disciplinary team, as well as ‘mental health on the high street’ through our flagship Head Room café in North West London. We work across the generations as well as with carers.
Primary and secondary prevention
Within our Suicide Prevention Strategy, we have been exploring both ‘primary prevention’ – engaging in community consultation focus groups – and ‘secondary prevention’ – ensuring that our whole organisation receives training commensurate with their role, alongside our pathways and monitoring of people who are struggling with their suicidality.
We gained insights from community focus groups when we held events in partnership with Public Health at London Borough of Barnet and Community Barnet to listen to the community’s views on what they think prevents people from seeking support and the role that the community can play to help.
The Jami team has continued to work with groups from the community and to hold one-to-one interviews with rabbis and clergy within the community. The evidence from these interviews and focus groups will then feed into bespoke training, which we will also share more widely to support other groups wanting to create nuanced training that is culturally sensitive for their communities.
We heard the following through the focus groups:
• Shame and stigma are concerns that are widely spoken about in relation to being barriers to seeking support.
• There are deep concerns and anxieties about young people in relation to this area.
• There is an awareness that the community needs to address the specifics for neurodiverse people.
• There is an interest in culturally-specific suicide prevention training – over 50% of those we spoke to would like to access the new training.
• People are interested in looking at suicide from the perspective of Jewish texts and explicitly in ‘prayers for the sick’ for people with mental health concerns.
• There is an appetite to encourage clergy to train in suicide prevention so that they are all singing from the same hymn sheet and providing a standardised response in communities.
These findings are important guiding principles for Jami as we develop our suicide prevention activities both within our mental health services and through our education outreach work. We are all familiar with Julie Cerel’s work on the estimated number of people affected by one suicide.
We know our community at a deep level and understand it is a systemic and diverse population. It is linked by schools and youth clubs, places of worship, sports and cultural activities, and social care hubs. We feel that the ripple effect in faith-based societies may be far greater than the 135 people who Cerel’s team estimated.
We also know that social media now plays a major role in the ripple effect, which has been researched by Dr Jo Bell and her team at Hull University.
Our insights to date have been shared at the NSPA Conference 2024 and through the Samaritans Safer Public Spaces Network and the Barnet Suicide Prevention Strategy Partnership Group.
There is a famous quote from the Talmud, the ancient Jewish text meaning ‘teaching’, which provides wisdom on every area of human life and, even by modern standards, is comprehensive.
~ Talmud (Sanhedrin 37a)‘Anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world,’
We have the opportunity to help people turn away from despair and towards hope. There is another famous Jewish teaching that can help provide purpose and action planning when faced with the challenging task of suicide prevention.
Rabbi Tarfon taught:
~ Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers“It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either.” (2:16)
When we work together we can make a crucial difference
We all believe that suicide is everyone’s business and, when we work together, we can make a crucial difference. We want to enable people to feel more supported and less impacted by stigma, and for communities to feel more empowered to have conversations that might help save lives.
We welcome all communities to be in touch with us, so that we can continue to learn together.
About the Author

Philippa Carr is Senior Mental Health Education and Suicide Prevention Manager at Jami (part of Jewish Care). Philippa’s background is as a clinician working in NHS Adult Mental Health Services, voluntary sector family services and other education and training roles. She has led on ground-breaking projects at Jami, such as the Emergency Response Initiative Consortium providing guidance and a First Responder service for schools on suicide ‘postvention’.
In addition to her work in this area with schools, she was recently commissioned to write a postvention guide for organisations by Barnet Council. She has presented at NSPA’s national conference on Suicide Prevention and the Jewish community.
Philippa led Jami’s response to providing psychologically informed support to the community following 7th October. You can view the resources created by Jami which feature Philippa on the Jami website.
She is a writer and, as well as contributing professionally to blogs and articles, she is writing a novel set in Vienna, Austria and Czechoslovakia.