Understanding that there is no conscious reason for these feelings puts mental illness on a par with other illnesses. You wouldn't ask a woman with breast cancer why she had it, or why she was ill - saying "I have breast cancer" is a pretty satisfactory argument for most. Mental illness isn't any different, and it's just as much of a scary, alien thing to sufferers than other illnesses.

Stephen Fry is in the news today after he talks in an interview about a suicide attempt last year. He said: "Now, you may say, how can anyone who has got it all be so stupid as to want to end it all? That's the point, there is no 'why?', it's not the right question. There's no reason." So, how can you start the conversation if you are worried about someone?

Stephen Fry is extremely successful in many different areas of life; a 'national treasure'. How can someone popular, wealthy, busy and successful, end up feeling hopeless and despairing? Yet it's well established from psychological research that there is a link between fame and suicide.

In what seems like another life, I was a medical student in the mid-80s. The New Romantic movement had only just begun its steep decline, along with my spiked-up straw-dyed hair. Around then, one of my clinical tutors died from Aids. Fellow students whispered that he was gay and "promiscuous". So then, otherwise caring people were implying that he deserved to die from HIV.

If there's one thing I learnt in CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) it's that we have to take something positive from every negative experience. Or w...

Based on medieval attitudes towards suicide which persisted until recently, using the word 'commit' does nothing to recognise the pain that an individual was going through before they took their own lives. Instead, suicide remains a taboo issue and the connotation of illegality and shamefulness adds to the stigma and grief felt by the deceased's family and friends.

Stories about men as toxic, as bad boys, are so much part of the cultural lexicon, that when I lecture, audiences are sometimes perplexed by the idea of providing specific services for vulnerable men. This is despite explaining that thousands of men commit suicide every year in the UK, 4552 in 2011, three times the rate of women.