IT’S very difficult to write or talk about people who decide they want to kill themselves.

There are so many factors involved in the subject that comment can easily hurt those who have already had more than anyone’s fair share of emotional suffering.

But something has to be said after the announcement by the Highways Agency last week that they are reviewing ‘the safety’ of scores of bridges in East Lancashire after what they call an unusually high number of ‘incidents.’ The Highways Agency is referring to several recent occasions where people have brought traffic to a standstill after going onto motorway bridges and very publicly threatening to jump – and that’s a very different matter to Swiss clinics and so-called euthanasia.

It is also not a new phenomena.

Multi-storey car parks in Blackburn and Pendle have been the scene of similarly public attempts by people to take their own lives and some have resulted in death.

And over the years train drivers in East Lancashire and everywhere have been unfortunate enough to find themselves occasionally travelling swiftly towards someone who has deliberately put themselves on the line.

The trauma of such an experience on the mind of the driver who knows he cannot stop in time, is impossible to imagine.

The sad fact is however that some men and women will always feel themselves driven to threaten to commit suicide in a public manner.

No amount of ‘reviews’ and expensive construction plans by the health and safety lobby will ever be able to rid us of high-profile locations where an individual could kill his or herself within sight of others.

The priority surely should be not to make sure that every balcony, tower, roof and bridge is modified so no one can make a fatal jump.

Rather it should be to spend more money on the services which help people who feel they are compelled to take such desperate action.

Mental health has long been a Cinderella service, financially squeezed at the expense of more ‘sexy’ spending.

With the nation in the grip of a recession families are finding themselves under more and more financial and mental stress as unemployment increases and public spending cuts bite.

This is likely to lead to yet more people taking, or threatening to take the ultimate step.

The humane way of meeting this challenge is to give more resources to mental health professionals and charities like the Samaritans – not to spend a fortune building pedestrian barriers on motorway bridges.