02/09/2026
I fell to the floor when I got the call to say Dad had attempted su***de. I was by his bedside when his heart stopped beating.
He was 55.
I loved him fiercely, we all did, and still do; just now from afar.
Dad’s death turned my world upside down and I knew that things would never be the same again.
I yearned for the person that I used to be and questioned why this heartbreak had happened to my beautiful little family.
During Dad’s inquest, I felt that I had learned far too much about su***de to walk away, I was invested. I felt an all-consuming urge to do something and I knew I had two options:
1) Bang the drum and hope that somebody, somewhere would eventually listen.
2) Do it myself.
I chose the latter.
I quit my job, quit unhelpful friendships, quit my abusive relationship, quit anything and everything that wasn’t serving me well. I wasn’t willing to spend one more day living a life that wasn’t good enough for me. I picked the parts of myself that I wanted to take forward and left the rest behind. I stopped yearning for the person I was before and decided to build myself back as the person I wanted to be, the person my family deserved, and ultimately the person that could build this service that I had dreamt up.
On 23rd February 2019, we opened The Martin Gallier Project, the UK’s first and only su***de prevention, intervention and postvention charity. A non-clinical space, offering immediate access to life-saving su***de interventions on the high street, with no waiting list, no criteria, and no barriers to access. My mission was to make su***de support as accessible and timely as buying a coffee, so that nobody had to face su***de crisis alone and no family had to navigate the devastation of su***de loss without appropriate compassion and support.
To date, The Martin Gallier Project has completed over 67,000 life-saving su***de interventions and counting; their stories continue, and so does ours. I’m proud of every single one of them, and I’m sure my Dad would be too.
And I suppose that’s the simplest way I can explain why, when I say I get it, I really do.
Jessica Gallier-Booth 🖤
Founder & CEO
