ROSALIND Nicoll has instant recall of the moment which changed her life; the moment she found her 14-year-old son hanging from a door frame, the soft belt from her dressing gown wrapped around his neck.

She has had 23 years to replay every detail about that Tuesday in August 1993 and attempt to find an answer to why Colin took his own life.

However in the last 18 years she has also been asking a different question: why is there so little support for people like her in the aftermath of a family suicide?

After years of scraping funds together, her organisation Touched by Suicide, which supports between 100 and 150 people a year, has finally been put on a stronger financial footing with a £10,000 grant from the Voluntary Action Fund. A grant she hopes will soon be doubled.

That money, she believes has “opened doors” to other sources of funding, including a £13,500 grant from The Robertson Trust, enabling the organisation to pay for volunteers’ expenses, to plan ahead for its growing number of groups, and have a full-time co-ordinator.

“Twenty three years ago I felt I was fighting a losing battle to get help for myself,” says the 60-year-old from Irvine. “I don’t feel much has changed over the years. There’s been a lot of investment recently in mental health services to deal with issues like suicide - which is a problem which never goes away though people still don’t like to talk about it - and yet there is no official support for the people left behind dealing with the loss.

“Money goes into Chooselife for suicide prevention but they need to realise that work needs to be done to help individuals bereaved by suicide. They feel all sorts of guilt and believe they don’t deserve help and unfortunately the services available prove that to be the case as they can wait a long time for counselling on the NHS and can then be told that referrals to psychiatry are inappropriate.

“Voluntary support groups like Touched by Suicide are really all that’s available, but funding is very precarious. More needs to be done. Statutory services seem to think this support should be done for nothing - if I had £1 for everyone who said we did a great job, then we wouldn’t need to apply for grants.”

Touched by Suicide was launched six years ago, growing out of the Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (SoBS) organisation which is based in England. Rosalind has been chairperson ever since, taking on the role full time last year.

“With the money we’ve received I’ve been able to focus all my attention on the organisation and we’ve been able to plan ahead for the group meetings and expand them to other areas of Scotland including Fife and West Lothian so we now have 11,” she says.

“We’ve done a survey which showed us that people were being left for at least six months after a suicide before any help was being offered, and even then it wasn’t appropriate help. People don’t need psychiatric help, they need someone to talk to. There’s a big gap in services.”

The Scottish Government currently spends £150m on mental health services, but in terms of support for families struggling to deal with suicide bereavement there is little help available.

“Suicide prevention is so important,” says Rosalind. “But so is help for those who struggle to cope in the aftermath. There were no clues for me with Colin. He wasn’t depressed, he wasn’t being bullied, he wasn’t finding his life difficult… he was an ordinary 14-year-old boy. There was nothing to alert me or his dad or brother that he might be contemplating it.

“It was a Tuesday, I was off work, he was off school. We sat and ate lunch together and at 12.50 he went upstairs to his room. I went up ten minutes later and found my beautiful son…”

Rosalind pulled him down and attempted CPR after dialling 999. “I kept thinking he’d sit up and laugh and say it was a joke but of course he didn’t. My baby was dead.

“The day went by in a blur, I just kept thinking I must be a bad mother not to have known. For the first six months I just wanted to die to be with him. I was sent to see a psychiatrist who said I needed a grief counsellor so sent me to a mental health nurse, but he said he had no idea how to help me.”

Rosalind, went back to work, but also did two years training as a person-centred counsellor and for the last 18 years has voluntarily counselled those who’ve lost someone through suicide. For ten years she tried to get funding in Ayrshire to establish a voluntary support group “which was extremely frustrating”, before joining SoBS in Glasgow, which later became Touched by Suicide.

“I can go back to that day in August instantly,” says Rosalind. “It’s been 23 years for me and it’s less painful but it still hurts. For those who’ve lost someone more recently, then having a place they can speak about how they feel, to find out they’re not going nuts is invaluable. That’s why we’re so delighted that we’ve finally won some grants, but it also underlines why government funding through health boards is vital.”

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