Suicide ideation - experiences of adversely racialised people: research

2 Context

The initial phase of activities to support Action 7 was completed between December 2019 – October 2020. However, analysis of the engagement identified a number of gaps which found little involvement of people from minority ethnic communities, including migrant and refugee communities. Therefore, this second phase of activities has been developed to ensure the perspectives of ethnic minority communities are included in the analysis of suicide risk groups.

Scottish Association of Mental Health (SAMH) is responsible for the delivery of Action 7.

The Training Research Education and Engagement Management (TREEM) Consultancy was commissioned by SAMH to carry out the second phase of the research with ethnic minority communities.

TREEM are not experts in mental health. We are a collective of community engaged scholars and activists with a combined more than 30 years' experience of working with communities and individual people racialised in our policy and service provisions processes. Our main objective is to support racialised communities' perspective to become evidenced and incorporated into research and policy decision making.

Our wide experience of community engaged research and activism has built trust and extensive networks in diverse racialised groups in Scotland. Our research approach involves academics working with racialised communities and policy decision makers to explore a collaborative understanding of the challenges experienced by racialised groups, and to translate the findings into policy relevant solutions. This approach has been recognised and applied in key strategic organisations across sectors in Scotland to support the need for systems change.

TREEM recognises that the labels used by researchers and policy-makers often shape racialised groups' experiences in the community and in the work place (Bunglawala, 2019; Black British Academics, 2020; Aspinall, 2020; Aspinall, 2021) (Black British Academics, 2020). People are racialised differently at different times. However, irrespective of their experiences of racialisations, the experiences and outcomes of racialisation are largely similar.

We do not use the terms BAME or BME unless it has already been used in the reports and documents we cite from. Minority Ethnic people, people from minority ethnic backgrounds and people racialised has been used in this report. The ethics and politics within shifting terminology to categorise those racialised by society is complex. There is not capacity in this report to explore this issue, however we strongly suggest it should be formally engaged with for any future research and policy developing national strategies.