If you have come here expecting this column to be its usual light-hearted self, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed.

It’s difficult to be light-hearted about suicide.

But it’s a subject we need to talk about, and in more ways than one.

A few weeks ago I responded to a request for men like me to take part in a survey about mental health in general, and suicide in particular. It only took five minutes to complete, and it finished by asking if respondents would like to give a little more of their time and join a ‘focus group’.

I don’t think I’ve ever been on a focus group before, so I thought: why not?

Like almost everyone who has lived as long as I have, I have known a few people who have taken their own lives, so I have always wondered whether we really are as powerless to prevent it as we tend to think.

And if somebody is willing to organise a focus group to consider solutions, it must be worth a try.

The group is facilitated by Swindon Borough Council, an organisation we like to criticise when they get things wrong (and they do), and I doubt they have much of a budget to tackle the big mental health issues that lead to suicide. But they are trying, and the focus group is part of the campaign to reduce the suicide rate locally.

Swindon’s statistics are slightly different to the national picture, but broadly come down to the same shocking bottom lines. The leading cause of death of British men under 50 is not cancer nor road accidents nor anything else you might guess at, but suicide.

And although you might assume that people who take their own lives are split fifty-fifty between the sexes, men are three times more likely to do it than women.

Another shocker is that although many suicide victims are already known to mental health services, in the case of more than half of them, their desperation came as a complete surprise to everybody they knew. In a world increasingly infested with people who either peddle or subscribe to the ridiculous notion that there is a simple solution to every problem, I hesitate to suggest there is an easy answer to this terribly complex question.

The ‘cure’ is certainly not the one that some people imagine will fit anybody on the spectrum of depression, loneliness or bereavement, which is to tell them to ‘cheer up’ or - even worse - ‘man up’.

But the good news about the fight to reduce and possibly even eliminate suicide is that while the ultimate answer is still a huge challenge to the experts, it seems there is a simple strategy that we can all adopt that can make a big difference to people thinking about taking their own life. Studies show that suicide rates fall dramatically when some kind of intervention is made, however small, and simply getting someone to open up is often a decisive first step in someone’s complete recovery from suicidal thoughts.

Something as simple as asking someone how they are, and listening, could be enough to prevent a disaster.

So our little focus group quickly came to the conclusion that setting up intervention mechanisms is the key, and something that all of us can do, if we put our minds to it. So I am looking forward to staying involved in the focus group.

In a society that seems increasingly uncaring and intolerant, whilst encouraging the deliberate isolation of anyone showing any kind of perceived weakness, it is more important than ever for those who do care to focus wherever we can.