If suicide prevention works, we must fund it like lives depend on it.
The news that PAPYRUS, one of the UK’s leading youth suicide prevention charities, has collapsed into administration should make everyone involved in mental health and public services sit up. It should also make us angry.
PAPYRUS was not some peripheral organisation doing nice things at the edges of the mental health system. Its HOPELINE247 provided specialist, round-the-clock suicide prevention support to young people, families and professionals. The service was relied upon by NHS trusts and CAMHS. Yet after years of rising demand and rising costs, the charity has closed, with more than 120 jobs lost. Its administrators cited, among other things, a “reduction in reliable funding across the sector”.
So here’s the uncomfortable question: If the NHS relies on a service to help keep people alive, who is responsible for making sure that service survives? Because PAPYRUS is not an isolated case.
Here in Norfolk and Waveney, we have already seen what happens when vital community mental health provision disappears. Access Community Trust entered administration earlier this year. Its STEAM House Cafés in Gorleston and King’s Lynn closed immediately, taking with them accessible, community-based mental health support that had operated seven days a week and provided a non-clinical alternative for people experiencing mental distress.
These were not fringe services. The Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care System described its network of wellbeing hubs as a key part of the transformation of community mental health services. STEAM was developed to provide a safe, welcoming place for people experiencing mental distress, including an evening crisis support offer.
And then there is Norfolk and Waveney Mind’s Connecting Communities service, which ceased operating because of funding challenges in 2025. It had been part of the preventative infrastructure supporting communities before people reached the point of needing more intensive intervention.
Each time, we seem to treat the disappearance of the service as an unfortunate event rather than asking the much bigger question: Why are we funding mental health and wellbeing provision in a way that makes this almost inevitable?
If prevention really is better than cure, value it
There is a profound contradiction at the heart of mental health provision: We talk constantly about prevention. We talk about early intervention. We talk about reducing pressure on the NHS. We talk about keeping people out of A&E. We talk about community-based support. We talk about suicide prevention. We talk about tackling loneliness, isolation and the social determinants of poor mental health.
And then we ask charities to deliver all those things through precarious funding arrangements, short-term contracts, grants that don’t cover the full cost of delivery and funding streams that can disappear from one year to the next. The result is a system that shifts costs rather than reducing them.
Community-based organisations spend years building trust with a population. They develop relationships with GPs, NHS teams, schools, social workers and local authorities. They become the place someone goes before they reach crisis point. Then the funding ends. The service disappears. The relationships fragment. The expertise goes. But the problem doesn’t, and eventually that person presents somewhere else – often somewhere considerably more expensive, such as an NHS crisis service or hospital A&E department.
Norfolk’s voluntary sector is already telling us what's coming
The latest State of the Norfolk VCSE Sector survey makes for uncomfortable reading:
- 71% of organisations said their financial position had worsened over the previous six months.
- Half reported that paid roles were at risk.
- A third had used unplanned reserves.
- A quarter had reduced their services because of funding shortages.
These aren’t abstract statistics. Every percentage point represents an organisation having to ask what it can stop doing.
The same survey found that confidence in organisations still operating a year later had fallen from 88% to 79%. That should concern commissioners and policymakers just as much as it concerns charities. Because a voluntary sector organisation doesn’t need to formally collapse before the public loses its service. It can simply become too small to function properly.
It’s no different for MensCraft. Grant funding is increasingly hard to come by. Our commissioned suicide prevention service has less than two years left on the contract. We do not know whether it will be renewed when it ends.
That is the reality for many voluntary-sector organisations: providing essential services while having no certainty that they will be funded to continue.
What can be cut when the bones are already bare?
The major cost for most organisations is people. Voluntary sector staff are already paid significantly less than their public-sector equivalents, so there is a limit to how far salaries can be squeezed or workloads increased – a limit many of us are already at.
We can cut communications and training, delay investment, reduce opening hours, use more reserves and rely more heavily on volunteers. Eventually, we are left with no other budget lines to trim but staff and services.
Every one of those cuts reduces our capacity to provide support. Ultimately, less prevention means more people reaching crisis.
Charities aren’t cheaper, they're different
The value of charities is not that they can provide the same services as the public sector for less money. They can’t, and they shouldn’t be expected to.
What they can do is work differently. They can often respond quickly, build trust in communities, involve volunteers, try new approaches and work with people who may not engage with statutory services. They can develop a service around a local need rather than fitting everyone into an existing system.
That flexibility matters, particularly in prevention. A men’s group in a community venue, a youth worker who can build a relationship with a boy who won’t engage with formal services, or a volunteer who keeps in touch with someone who is isolated may not look like a conventional mental health intervention, but they create the conditions and opportunities that help people before they reach crisis.
Charities also bring in volunteers, community fundraising and other resources that public services don’t have in the same way. But these things add value; they don’t replace proper funding.
Innovation, flexibility and goodwill cannot pay wages, rent buildings or keep essential services running indefinitely. If we want charities to keep working differently, we must fund them properly.
PAPYRUS should be a warning, not just a tragedy
The collapse of PAPYRUS should prompt a much bigger conversation about how we fund prevention. If an organisation dedicated specifically to preventing young suicide can find itself in administration despite enormous public need, specialist expertise, decades of experience and high-profile fundraising, none of us in this sector should assume that our own services are safe, and nor should commissioners. The question isn’t simply: Can we afford to fund this service? It should be: What will it cost if this service disappears?
That means looking unflinchingly at the cost of failure: increased demand on the NHS, more people reaching crisis point, pressure on emergency services, lost expertise, lost relationships and, ultimately, lost lives.
One of Papyrus UK’s lasting legacies is their outstanding ASIST (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training) model, something that I and other MensCraft colleagues use almost every day in our work with clients.
If we genuinely believe that prevention saves lives, then prevention has to be funded as though lives depend upon it. Because they do.
Adam Shawyer, Contact Service Coordinator, North Norfolk