Pooja Saini: Reducing Stigma and Preventing Suicide
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Collaborating and innovating
Pooja Saini is a highly innovative Professor of Suicide and Self-Harm Prevention, working in LJMU’s School of Psychology. Her research focuses on individual, community, and whole systems approaches to preventing suicide, especially among men and children and young people. Pooja’s work emphasises collaboration, and she has partnered with key organisations including James’ Place, Alfie’s Squad, and The Martin Gallier Project.
Together, they are improving outcomes and the experience of care, reducing stigma, and evaluating what works so they can develop and support new programs. We spoke about how Pooja and her team use research to help prevent suicide and self-harm throughout the UK, including through her podcast, Let’s Talk Hope: Ending the Stigma around Suicide, and the Summer 2025 Hope Show roadshow.
Suicide prevention
Before working in suicide prevention, Pooja held healthcare assistant jobs working with vulnerable populations. She was in her early 20s and had not met suicidal people before. In these jobs she began to see how prevalent suicidality could be in different communities, including for asylum seekers and for South Asian women who could face domestic violence. As she progressed in her career, she worked with young people, often girls in secure units who would harm themselves or boys with learning disabilities, who also expressed self-harming behaviours.
It became apparent to Pooja that suicide and self-harm prevention were huge issues that must be faced head-on. And she saw yet another iceberg: suicide is a huge issue for men. Three quarters of people who die by suicide are men. Men are getting less likely to stay in Accident and Emergency wards. Compared to women, men are less likely to speak about their experiences or to engage and stay with the help available for them.
Talking about suicide
In her first years as a researcher, Pooja worried about saying the word ‘suicide’. How would people react? Reflecting, Pooja realised it was adding to a stigma that might harm people. ‘I remember going to a Zero Suicide conference led by the Zero Suicide Alliance, joined up with Mersey Care’, Pooja recalls, ‘I remember a speaker saying, “it's community, it's everyone's business”’. Being open is a way to help people, giving them the space to be able to think, ‘Oh, it's okay to talk about this. It's okay to say the word “suicide”’. If somebody needs to talk, Pooja says, taking away the stigma in an overt way gives them comfort to know they can speak to someone who's non-judgmental.
This is hugely important for all the people who might be affected by suicide. Pooja describes the importance of reducing ‘the stigma for people bereaved by suicide, where I've heard heart-breaking stories of best friends stopping talking from the day that somebody's been bereaved by a suicide, because they're worried about the impact that might have on their family and their children’. If someone becomes a single parent and loses their friends overnight, they need support, not silence.
Her advice to researchers is to talk about your work. If someone asks you what you do, don't say, ‘I work in mental health’. Be very clear that you work in suicide prevention. When she started to do this, even ‘at the school gate, anywhere I would’, she tried to always be open. Through those conversations, she spoke to people who had been bereaved by suicide or who knew someone who'd been bereaved by suicide. It struck her that all the people who died were young men.
Through those conversations, Pooja met Clare Milford Haven, who had founded the charity James’ Place following the death of her son, James. Their conversation focused on an evidence base for community-level support, which accorded with Pooja’s research findings. It quickly led to focused, collaborative work in Liverpool to support the community-based service available to men.
As Pooja’s work has developed, her research has started to focus more on women and young people again. By working with charities and the people who are asking for help, she has seen how issues affecting suicide and self-harm can start in early adolescence. To tackle these problems early, Pooja and her colleague Emma Ashworth are leading one of the first trials in UK schools for suicide prevention, the NIHR-funded Multi-Modal Approach to Preventing Suicide in Schools (MAPSS) project.
Innovating beyond co-production
This is community work. People who ask for help sometimes tell Pooja that researchers seem like they ‘don't come out to us, but they expect us to come to them’. She goes to people where they want to connect, and mixes with as many people as possible to understand their points of view, ‘I have worked hard to do this, and I think part of that is because I'm from a different cultural background’.
Often, research can be ‘co-produced’ when researchers have a program of work and build in an interaction with people who have lived experience of suicide or self-harm. However, Pooja reflects on how this design can be harmful, locking in a power dynamic that focuses on specific outcomes. It can lead to people feeling isolated and saying, ‘I don't want you to measure how many times I self-harm. I want you to understand how I am feeling’.
Her evaluative method emphasises how people experience their distress. If distress reduces, how does that influence behaviour? If someone uses a different method of self-harm, they might not lower number of times they do it, but they have reduced the danger. To Pooja, looking at distress shows the need for involving people with lived experience in all phases of the research process. They can say what success looks like rather than leave feeling they have been reported on. Researchers, Pooja says, should ask themselves ‘are you willing to go one step further than just involving people, can you listen to them and let them shape everything?’
Sometimes, people are surprised that evaluating their experience of a health service in a community centre is scientific work. ‘For me, it's not just about theory. It's not just about the evidence base. They're important, but it's also about how we can realistically apply the theory and findings in the most ethical ways’. It is collaborative research on the most effective ways to support people who are accessing services, always aware that being involved in a piece of research can have big effects on a person’s life. If an experiment design says that one group will be a ‘control’ and not receive an intervention, Pooja asks, how is it ethical to withhold care from them when the consequences could be so serious? Her research is on alternative approaches, innovating so the gold standard is keeping everyone safe while testing interventions, ‘and I'm happy to push the boundary on that’.
The experience of care
The focus on personal experience is crucial for Pooja. Working with her research team, and funded by Mersey Care, she has designed a new self-harm intervention based on psychodynamic research. A person will sit with a therapist to discuss how they come to the point of self-harm. They map this together and then identify their ways to cope when they feel distressed.
The first trial of the intervention showed reductions in depression and distress. Help seeking went up. When people self-harmed, they did it in less dangerous ways. Most of all, people reported a step-change in their experience, ‘saying, it's the first time I've ever got to the root of the problem’ and wanting to engage more with the support. Pooja says, ‘for me the most important bit is people say this therapy works for them. It's a brief psychological therapy, of five or six sessions. People don’t say “I need loads more”. They're saying, “this has been life changing for me"'.
The sessions focus on self-harm, ‘and that's the same thing that people have said about James's place or other community-based services I work with, you're straight in. There's no tiptoeing around. You're focusing on the issue at hand. And I think people really appreciate that. It feels less judgmental, and you're getting to the root of the problem’. At the end of the sessions, the therapist writes a letter to the person going through the safety planning they discussed together, ‘and when we did the interviews after the trial, people carried it around with them. So, this is something that they continue to use’.
Working together to improve programmes
Along with James’ Place, Pooja works with The Martin Gallier Project, which is a suicide prevention crisis service, and Alfie’s Squad, which is a service for bereaved children. Her work often focuses on evaluating their programmes, using her research insights to understand what works well. As well as improving outcomes, it gives the organisations more confidence in their programme design.
The evaluation reports open opportunities for more research on these organisations, including how their programmes adapt to external circumstances. In one award-winning paper, Pooja looked at how James’ Places adapted during the COVID-19 lockdowns including the outcomes for men.
This work ensures the organisations can be certain when they think things are getting better for the people using their services. By developing surveying tools for James’ Place and Alfie’s Squad, Pooja’s research is generating evidence that can confirm trends and help them put their resources in the best places to help the most people.
The Hope Show
Pooja and her team work across the country, with workplaces and in schools to address stigma around suicide. With her team, Pooja is showcasing good practice to professionals in these environments, ensuring they are integrated with local services, and helping reduce some of the negative experiences.
The team present their research findings in the Let’s Talk Hope podcast, which has become a national roadshow, The Hope Show, that launched in June 2025 with Grassroots Suicide Prevention. The Hope Show is going through Scotland, Wales, and England, focusing on different topics related to suicide and self-harm prevention. In each city, the team are working with partner organisations to launch events and build connections between the services working there.
Pooja has also been appointed Honorary Suicide Prevention Research Lead at Mersey care NHS Foundation Trust and leads suicide prevention research for the Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre (M-RIC). The team’s work on stigma and health systems is shaping policy discussions in the region and informing debate in Parliament. Their evidence supports All Parliamentary groups related to suicide prevention and education, and their collaborative work with James’ Place is helping policy discussions on male suicide prevention.
Using impact to develop research careers
The best changes happen when people work together. Networking and speaking together are key skills that Pooja teaches new researchers in her team. They often meet to check in on each other and share good ideas. The team prioritise their mutual support and try to socialise often, making an environment where everyone is comfortable sharing together.
Pooja underlines how important it is to show the results of early career researchers’ work, especially on a conference stage. The team use conferences to build up their own professional and leadership skills by learning from researchers and practitioners. Networking is about meeting new points of view, ‘and this is what you need to do to progress as a researcher’. The ideas that will shape your research career might not be available inside universities, and Pooja encourages colleagues to meet people and learn from as many perspectives as possible.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Pooja whether working in the suicide prevention can be depressing. From her perspective, there are so many positive changes from the research community. Researchers and practitioners are upbeat at conferences because of their mutual support and passion for preventing suicide. All the services Pooja works with are saving lives. By working together on how to help people, they are doing what they set out to do.
Pooja spoke with Martin Brooks