‘Hitting the water was like hitting a brick wall, I broke my back but I wanted to live’ – Men open up about attempting suicide and surviving

The voices screaming “Nobody loves you, nobody cares about you, you need to die,” were silenced when Kevin Hines hit the ice cold water 245ft below the Golden Gate bridge.

Just moments earlier, he had made the decision to take his own life – he was just 19.

After being haunted by voices since he was 10 years old, Kevin had travelled on a bus from his apartment to the bridge – where 2000 people had already tragically taken their own lives.

He took the middle seat at the back and shouted: “Leave me alone, I don’t want to die!”

“I had made a pact with myself that if one person said: ‘Hey buddy, are you OK?’ I wouldn’t do it. I would tell them everything and beg for their help. They said nothing. I paced the bridge for 40 minutes crying and was only approached by a woman to take her picture,” he remembers.

“I took her picture and she turned away. The voice in my head said, ‘Jump now’ – and I did.”

Kevin survived, but around 800,000 people a year aren’t so lucky.

According to research carried out by the World Health Organisation, somebody dies by suicide every 90 minutes in the UK, and every 40 seconds across the world.

Three quarters of those people in the UK are men.

But why has suicide become the biggest killer in men under 50? It takes more lives of men in this age bracket than car accidents and cancer.

Now, men like Kevin, one of the 36 people who have ever survived the fall from the bridge, and fathers, like Steve Mallen, whose son Edward died on the railway tracks in Cambridgeshire just six weeks after they celebrated his 18th birthday, are campaigning for change and support for men who desperately need it.

This is the subject of tonight’s BBC Two documentary Horizon: Stopping Male Suicide, during which narrator Dr Xand Van Tulleken speaks to those who have been affected and tries to find out why the most likely thing to kill young men is themselves.

“I was broken, battered, mangled and bent, but I prayed to live”

Kevin, now 37, describes the impact as ‘like hitting a brick wall’ and broke two of the bones in his spine, yet in that moment, the voices stopped.

Instead, he heard a voice he hadn’t for a long time – his own – and it told him he wanted to live.

“I did the only thing I did and prayed to live,” he says.

“In that moment, I realised I had just made the single biggest mistake in my life, and it was too late.”

He was rescued by two members of the coastguard (the RNLI estimates that 200 people die each year from suspected self-harm and suicide events in UK waters) who asked him: “Do you know what you just did there? Why?”

Kevin had no answers. After spending time in seven psychiatric hospitals over 11 years, he began coming to terms with being left, neglected and crying for help, when he was just a baby, before being adopted, and prescribed several medications to manage bipolar.

He describes one major turning point for him was when his adoptive father came to visit him in hospital.

“This man, who I had not seen cry in 19 years, waterfalls flew from his eyes. I pulled off my oxygen mask and said, ‘Dad I’m sorry’, and my immediate reaction was guilt,’ he says.

“He said, ‘No Kevin, I’m sorry’, and his immediate reaction was guilt, and guilt belonged to neither of us.”
“People think, ‘Oh he’s done this and now he’s got his life back’. No, it took seven psychiatric hospitals over eleven years to prevent myself from suicidal crisis.”

He is now a suicide prevention campaigner, helping people worldwide by sharing his story.

 “I went home- and I tried to hang myself”

On the outside, Tony Robertson is confident, chatty, and like any other man you might meet at the pub.
Yet after his friend Dan died by suicide, Tony was plagued by guilt over not recognising how low one of his closest friends had become.

“Dan built up such a persona that everything was OK. I could see he was struggling but I didn’t know how much. I could see the cracks appearing. He had lost his job,” Tony says.

“I remember so well. My friend Jamie called me and said: ‘Have you heard about Dan? He’s just tried to kill himself. It doesn’t look good.

“I sat in the pub just waiting for a text and it came through: ‘He’s gone.’ I just broke down. He was last person I would ever have imagined going through with something like that.

“I’ve kept his texts, it’s good to keep him close. But three months before he died, he actually text me saying: ‘I’m on suicide watch mate’. Looking back at it is difficult.”

Then, a few months after his death, Tony’s own life also began to unravel.

“Dan’s death had a massive impact on me. At the time I was suffering from depression and was a little too dependent on alcohol,” he says.

“Nothing made sense. I had so many thoughts bouncing off each other. I didn’t know where to turn, I didn’t know how to articulate how I was feeling. In one foul swoop I lost my job, my home, and I went bankrupt.

“It was around the time my daughter was born, but sadly I didn’t tell anyone how I felt. It got to the point where I thought I’d rather not be here.

“So I went home and I tried to hang myself.”

Tony then had what he describes as a "eureka moment" and couldn’t go through with what he was about to do.

“I re-evaluated my life and I made the decision that I don’t want to go anywhere. I told myself: ‘This is enough’.

“Now I’m really thankful to be here today to know how it feels [on the other side].”

“I stood next to my son’s coffin and I promised him I would act”

At 18 years old, Edward Mallen was head boy at school and had just won a place at Cambridge University – yet six weeks after celebrating his 18th birthday with his family, he was found on the railway tracks across from his house.

His devastated dad Steve remembers the morning with haunting clarity.

“It was a cold crisp day, the sun was shining and it was bright. In that that sense, it was no different to any other Monday morning,” he says.

“I became aware that something really wasn’t right when I heard the name of our small village on the radio. Almost exactly the same time there was a large knock at our door, and two large police officers came into our house.

“They informed us what had happened and left us a leaflet. It was almost as if someone had thrown a hand grenade into our house. I can only describe the feeling as staring into an abyss of grief.”

Edward would get the train to his sixth form college from his local station every morning, yet what his doting parents hadn’t known, is that their son had told five different medical professionals that he had thought about potentially ending his life on a railway.

Edward, who was voted ‘most likely to be Prime Minister at school’, had given his consent on two separate occasions for them to tell his parents. Yet nobody did.

Now Steve must live with their mistake, without his son by his side.

“The simple fact is - if I had known, at all, that my son had any suicidal thoughts involving a railway, do you honestly think I would have let him anywhere near the railway station in our very village that he travelled on every day?”

At his funeral in the local church, Steve promised his son he would act.

“I stood next to my son’s coffin and I promised him I would thoroughly investigate his terrible demise, but at the same time I would thoroughly investigate the whole issue of mental health and suicide.”

He has now launched a campaign called the Zero Suicide Alliance, which campaigns for better understanding and treatment of mental health at a local and national level.