The three walking dads vow to save suicide helpline

A father whose teenage daughter took her own life said he would campaign to reinstate a "life-saving" helpline after a suicide prevention charity folded.

Tim Owen, who lost 19-year-old Emily in 2020, has trekked the length and breadth of the UK as one of 3 Dads Walking, all of whom have lost a daughter to suicide.

They have raised £1.5m for the Papyrus emergency helpline, which earlier this week announced it had entered administration.

"It's got to be our priority to work out how it comes back, in some guise, to give our young people hope," said Owen, of Shouldham, near King's Lynn, Norfolk.

"We know that that phone line saved lives. It isn't there anymore - that's heartbreaking."

Since 2021, Owen, Andy Airey from Cumbria, and Mike Palmer from Greater Manchester, have taken on four epic walks for HopeLine 24/7, which helped it extend to a round-the-clock service.

They said its closure should be a wake-up call to the government that suicide prevention was not an "optional extra - it is a public health responsibility".

"We were only last week talking about what our next challenge was before we had the terrible news on Monday night," Owen told BBC Look East.

"In the near future, we're definitely channelling our energy into asking 'if we've lost HopeLine 24/7 and there's no support, no dedicated suicide prevention support for our young people across the UK, who's going to provide that'?

"That service could be taken and picked up by another service - it wouldn't take that much.

"As a society, we've let that support service disappear, and it was a unique service for young people."

The loss of Papyrus, he added, highlighted the fragility of the charity sector.

The chairman of Papyrus trustees Harry Biggs-Davison, who lost his 25-year-old son Patrick to suicide in 2015, said the decision had been "almost unbearable", but it had been struggling financially over the past two years.

Papyrus's administrators advised anyone struggling, or worried about a young person, to contact Samaritans, crisis line Shout, NHS 111, or 999 in an emergency.

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