Anna Wardley is the Founder and CEO of Luna Foundation, a social enterprise dedicated to transforming the support for children after suicide. Anna’s dad, Ralph, took his own life when she was nine and that loss had a profound impact on both her own life and the lives of those around her. Anna founded Luna in March 2022 to implement key recommendations from her Churchill Fellowship report entitled Time to Count, initially focusing on the provision of evidence-based suicide bereavement training for people working with children and young people.
On BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought Anna will share her own experience and speak on why we need better support for children and young people who lose a parent or primary caregiver to suicide. And why that should start with counting them. Listen to Anna on Four Thought. Broadcast Wednesday 7th December 2022 20.45.
Thousands of children and young people lose a parent or primary caregiver to suicide every year in the UK, but we don’t know exactly how many as nobody counts them. In the absence of official data, childhood bereavement charity Winston’s Wish estimates that more than 9,000 children are bereaved by parental suicide every year in the UK. These children must be counted and supported.
“My own lived experience and that of others who have also lost a parent to suicide is at the core of our work at Luna.“
International research shows that those who lose a parent to suicide in childhood are twice as likely to be hospitalised due to depression and three times as likely to take their own lives, compared to the wider population. To break this chain of poor mental health and increased suicide risk in people who experience parental suicide, we urgently need to quantify the scale of the need to improve the way we take care of the children left behind.
I am one of them myself. My own dad, Ralph, died by suicide when I was nine – and that loss has had a profound and lifelong impact on me and those around me. The lack of support available both then and now motivated me to apply for a Churchill Fellowship to improve the way we care for these children. A Churchill Fellowship is a grant that allows you to spend up to two months discovering new ideas and best practice among leading practitioners anywhere in the world. My own lived experience and that of others who have also lost a parent to suicide is at the core of my work.
My Research
In my Churchill Fellowship report entitled Time to count: supporting children after a parent dies by suicide, I share the findings of research I carried out over two years and across three continents. I have made 12 recommendations for taking better care of these vulnerable children to improve their mental health prospects and reduce their suicide risk. Here are five of my key recommendations:
- Collect robust data to quantify the number of children who lose a parent to suicide
- Provide specialist interventions distinct from general bereavement services
- Develop systematic referral and coordinated response after parental suicide
- Provide suicide bereavement training for people working with children and young people
- Establish an entity to create lasting change for children who lose a parent to suicide
Read more on Anna’s recommendations which were originally published as part of a blog on the Churchill Fellowship website, here. And her full report ‘Time to Count’ can be found here.
Earlier this year I embarked on my fifth recommendation when I formed the Luna Foundation, a social enterprise dedicated to transforming the support for children and young people who lose a parent or primary caregiver to suicide. Born out of my lived experience and international Churchill Fellowship research on parental suicide, Luna is a vehicle for positive change and hope is in our organisational DNA.
Time to Count
My primary recommendation, which I am now campaigning for is, as a matter of urgency, to count the number of children who are impacted by the suicide of a parent or primary caregiver in the UK. Without this vital data, policymakers are blind to the scale of the issue and lack the insight needed to develop a coherent and funded plan to support these young people and mitigate the well-documented risks they face.
In my Four Thought for BBC Radio Four, I share my own experience of losing my dad to suicide at nine years old and how that has led me to setting up Luna in order to improve support for other children and young people who find themselves in a similar situation. In the programme I describe myself as one of the ‘countless’ children who lose a parent to suicide each year. ‘Countless’ as nobody counts the number of children in the UK who are bereaved by parental suicide each year and I am now campaigning to change this.
After a Parent Dies by Suicide broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 at 20:45 GMT on Wednesday 7 December and repeated at 0545 on Saturday 10 December. Find it on BBC Sounds here.
The next step for our campaigning work at Luna includes working with Dame Caroline Dinenage MP to table a Westminster Hall debate on improving the support for children after suicide. This will draw attention to the urgent need to collect and publish data on a nationwide basis on the number of children bereaved by parental suicide. This will also highlight the need to provide specialist bereavement services, and suicide bereavement training for people working with children and young people.
I never want another child to feel as isolated as I did. I want others, who have lost a parent to suicide, to understand they are not alone. And that means speaking out where there’s suffocating silence, to share a story of hope, and shine a light for those in the grip of the darkness.
About the author
Anna Wardley is an endurance swimmer, motivational speaker, and Founder and CEO of Luna Foundation, a social enterprise dedicated to transforming the support for children after suicide. Anna’s dad, Ralph, took his own life when she was nine and that loss had a profound impact on both her own life and the lives of those around her. Anna founded Luna in March 2022 to implement key recommendations from her Churchill Fellowship report entitled Time to Count, initially focusing on the provision of evidence-based suicide bereavement training for people working with children and young people. Anna is part of the Sounddelivery Media Spokesperson Network Programme.
Follow Anna at @annawardley https://teamluna.org/