From Silent Suffering to Courageous Care: Suicide, Mental Health, and the Responsibility of Leadership in Higher Education

Building a Culture of Courageous Care

Suicide prevention is not solely about crisis response; it requires a long-term commitment to cultivating mental wellness and social resilience. Promoting mental health means empowering individuals with the tools to care for themselves, develop coping strategies, and seek help with confidence. When wellbeing is prioritised, society becomes more capable of meeting adversity with empathy, integrity, and hope.

In higher education (HE) (but also in society as a whole), this call to action begins with recognising vulnerability, not as weakness, but as an invitation to reimagine care. The moral imperative is clear: embed psychological safety, equip communities with relational tools, and ensure that institutional responsibility is both strategic and soulful.

From Vulnerability to Agency: Humanising Leadership Amid Systemic Strain

Although overall suicide rates are declining, students today face an unprecedented convergence of stressors; disrupted sleep, financial insecurity, harmful social media environments, and the erosion of youth services, all of which can intensify emotional distress and undermine wellbeing. Recent ONS data (2017–2020) reveals elevated suicide risk among male students (5.6 per 100,000), female students (2.5 per 100,000), and first-year undergraduates (7.8 per 100,000). This landscape demands more than reactive support it calls for an embedded ethos of care woven through governance, leadership, and pedagogy.

HE institutions must become life-affirming spaces where trauma-informed leadership, inclusive practice, and collaborative decision-making are woven into the fabric of everyday life. By nurturing relational skills, expanding diverse care pathways, and co-creating solutions with students, universities can move from crisis response to preventive compassion. In this light, suicide prevention becomes a ‘shared value’ and a hallmark of courageous, growth-oriented leadership.

Cultivating Resilience: A Systemic Response to Youth Mental Health

Mental ill-health now accounts for nearly half of the global disease burden among those aged 10-24 yet receives only 2% of global health funding. Even in economically advanced countries, access to care remains grossly insufficient. The Lancet Psychiatry Commission (2024), led by Professor Patrick McGorry, frames this disparity as a systemic failure, one that governments would not accept in areas like cancer or diabetes.

Driving this strain are entrenched structural inequities, wage exploitation, insecure employment, toxic social media ecosystems, climate anxiety, and deepening intergenerational divides. These forces accelerate emotional disengagement, loss of potential, and avoidable suffering. Yet within this complex landscape, HE has a distinctive opportunity, not simply to respond, but to lead.

Universities are uniquely positioned to model systemic change, rebalancing institutional priorities toward resilience, equity, and relational depth. By aligning their intellectual capital with moral purpose, they can champion inclusive cultures, cultivate courageous leadership, and foster environments where wellbeing is a shared commitment. If HE embraces this role fully, it becomes not only a site of learning, but a laboratory for hope and transformation.

Empathy in Action: Practical Frameworks for Responsive Care

Draper et al. (2015) propose a responsive suicide prevention model anchored in the 3Cs: connection, collaboration, and choice. These principles offer HE leaders a humane blueprint for care:

• Connection: builds trust and affirms the worth of individuals in distress.
• Collaboration: invites shared problem-solving and acknowledges lived experience.
• Choice: restores agency, allowing individuals to participate in their care decisions.

Integrating these principles across institutional systems supports a proactive wellbeing culture, one that is emotionally intelligent and morally aware. Whether applied in governance, support services, or curriculum design, they reinforce the university's potential as a transformative space of hope and healing.

Beyond Performance: Shaping Ethical, Adaptive Leadership

Change agents must model more than strategy they must embody emotional literacy, consistency, and deep moral courage. True transformation often occurs in subtle, unexpected moments and requires leaders to be present, reflective, and generous with their understanding. Adaptability must be twinned with authenticity.

To lead well is to balance structure with soul, firmness with fairness, accountability with empathy. Educators play a pivotal role here, using story and metaphor to bring abstract ideas to life and anchoring intellectual development in emotional insight. The difference between stretch and stress must be honoured, ensuring students are challenged within systems of support, not structures of harm.

Transformational leadership demands the courage to confront institutional inertia, dismantle toxic entitlement, and resist performative gestures. A just culture is not built by rule enforcement alone; it emerges from transparent dialogue, value-rooted actions, and relational integrity.

Championing Hope: Leadership's Call for a Resilient Tomorrow

Attentive, compassionate leadership is now an urgent necessity. To champion wellbeing is to notice silent burdens, to listen with conviction, and to respond with care. Through ethical modelling and cultures of courage, universities can restore trust, renew purpose, and foster environments where people thrive, not just academically, but emotionally, collectively, and sustainably.

This is HE's transformative horizon: not merely success, but significance; not just service provision, but soul-filled responsibility. As epicentres of critical thought, innovation, and civic leadership, universities are uniquely poised to shape a more humane, equitable world. Through embedded caring practice, universities can lead with hope and demonstrate how scholarship, compassion, and courage can co-create the futures we deserve.

For Staff:

While we focus on suicide prevention, it is important to emphasise that university wellbeing guidance and institution-wide Welfare, Safety, and Suicide Awareness training highlights the need to reach out for specialist support when students are actively suicidal. This approach not only reduces risk and ensures students get appropriate care in a crisis, but also protects staff wellbeing by reinforcing professional boundaries.