Zeki Kucuk-Kose is a software engineer and mental health advocate at the Rakuten Blockchain Lab in Belfast. In his spare time, he’s developing a suicide prevention app.
The idea for the app was prompted by Zeki’s own brother’s suicide over two years ago. He wanted to use the skills he learned as a software engineer to combat the problem, especially in Northern Ireland, where the rate of suicide is twice that of England’s (according to a study conducted in 2017 by Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency).
Zeki's aim is for the app to be one of the first lines of intervention for those contemplating suicide.
One question he said he gets asked quite a few times is, “do you think the app would have helped your brother?”
He said that once his brother passed away, his family checked his online browsing history and found he had been searching up suicide.
Zeki's full interview with Sync NI
Zeki states that if a person Google’s this on their device with his app downloaded, it will automatically bring up a notification of an organisation to call such as Lifeline or the Samaritans. It will also reveal pop-up notifications reminding the person that they are loved and needed.
He said: “I think if that happened my brother and something came up that reminded him that mum loves him, or that he has a pet cat that relies on him, or he received a sign to ring me, it would have made him stop for a minute and think”.
Various stories and events have added to Zeki’s app ideas. He mentioned a BBC Radio 4 story that he heard about a soldier’s wife named Becky insisting that she become part of his ‘suicide plan’. He said: “The radio broadcast itself went into more detail but, essentially, the fact that her husband has agreed to call her if he feels suicidal allows her to intervene and talk him down. The app’s suicide action plan creator has a section to add friends and family contact details and you are prompted to call them.
“When Becky went on the Combat Stress programme for partners, not only did she find people who understood, but she was given help that she says has changed her life. She was advised to go home and talk to her husband about his suicide plan, and make sure a phone call to her became part of his preparations. “
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Zeki also made note of the Samaritans’ assertion that it is a myth that if a person is serious about killing themselves, there’s nothing you can do: “Often, feeling actively suicidal is temporary, even if someone has been feeling low, anxious or struggling to cope for a long period of time. This is why getting the right kind of support at the right time is so important.”
He added that often when people feel overwhelmed, as they do when they search for suicide methods, they don’t intake and retain large pieces of text or information as it stresses them further; but he says that short concise messages like the ones he has incorporated in his app are better for helping a person who is feeling distressed.
Zeki has nicknamed the app 'The Oz Project' after his brother Ozzie. He is receiving help and support to develop it further from his whole team at Rakuten, and even travelled to the south of France to meet with Rakuten Aquafadas' team of app developers.
Table 1: Age standardised suicide rate per 100,000 in UK jurisdictions
Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that doesn’t currently have a specific policy agenda regarding mental health. A draft study was due to finally be put forward, but with no government minister to sign it off or release the funding, it remains in limbo for now.
In March 2019 there were 120,000 people waiting more than a year for an appointment with a mental health care professional in NI, compared to 5000 across England and Wales combined. The equivalent of one in 16 people in NI has been waiting more than a year, compared to at most one in 750 in Wales, and one in 48,000 in England. This means that a citizen of NI is more than three thousand times as likely as a citizen of England to have been waiting more than one year for healthcare, according to the ‘Review of Mental Health Policies in Northern Ireland: Making Parity a Reality’ published by Ulster University in June 2019.
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