Ms Caroline McGuigan:

I am CEO of Suicide or Survive, a voluntary organisation that I founded, and I will speak from my personal experience. I am a trained psychotherapist, a trained advocate and, most important, I am a mother of a 19-year-old boy, Conor, who was born when I was attending psychiatric services. I am also the mother of a 16-year-old girl, Amy, born years later when I was attending Trinity College.

People can learn to manage their mental health and lead full and meaningful lives. Every single one of us has mental health and we will have dips in our mental health because we are human beings, but how we treat people in the different stages of their mental dip has a massive impact on their distress, their experience and their recovery.

I once read a heartbreaking Irish survey in which 40% of people said someone like me should not have children, and we need to turn that around. At a time in my life when I lay in a bed having attempted suicide, when I died and was brought back to life, my husband was encouraged to sign me in.

I am grateful he had enough love and understanding to know that to sign me in involuntarily would have had a massive negative impact on my recovery.

Mental health can be and is messy, but by being educated and informed I can, like everybody else present, manage life and crisis, but it requires all of us to work together.