MRS & SRA Cymru: Understanding suicide prevention on the railways

MRS and SRA Cymru jointly bring Future Agenda’s ground-breaking and award-winning anthropological and ethnographic research for Network Rail to Cardiff.

Every 36 hours someone will choose to end their life on Britain’s railways, and numbers are rising. Despite some notable successes coming from the newly created suicide prevention team at Network Rail, there is a growing fear that current thinking and prevention methods may only go so far.

It is in this context that Network Rail commissioned Future Agenda to explore the phenomenon of rail suicide ‘hotspots’, and whether there may be identifiable connections between the communities that surround them and the suicides that take place.

The result was a first-of-its-kind exploration of both the cultural contexts of suicide phenomena and the theoretical underpinnings of rail suicide research. In this presentation Future Agenda’s Robin Pharoah will outline the new theoretical frameworks and concepts they created and the location-specific insights they generated during hundreds of hours of investigative fieldwork, all leading to a raft of new suicide-prevention strategies and actions on Britain’s railways.

Agenda:       

4.30pm – refreshments/networking
5.00pm – presentation
5.40pm – Q&A
6.00pm – close

This event is free to attend. Please book your place in advance.