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Good morning Natalie. I hope you had a pleasant sleep after a night in which you were inconvenienced and possibly had to sit in traffic for some time.

I hope you are waking up in a warm and secure home filled with the people who love you and you are looking forward to a peaceful and enjoyable weekend.

I hope you have time to reflect on the comment you made on our Facebook feed last night in relation to someone who is seriously ill and whose suicide bid, or cry for help, annoyed you.

I hope that thoughts of suicide don’t pop into your head every few minutes, voices don’t tell you that your friends are evil and are trying to harm you, or you just generally feel that you make the world a worse place to be in.

Here’s what you said: “Let’s hope he gets thrown in a nut house and charged by the police. Selfish t***.”

Natalie, if you don’t empathise with this poor man then perhaps you’ll be one of the lucky people who never experience mental health issues in your lifetime. The bad news for you is that you’re extremely unlikely to go through life unscathed by this hideous set of diseases and conditions.

Through personal trauma that you might not be able to imagine, because of a chemical imbalance or just because they had the sheer bad luck to be born that way, one in four people in the UK will experience mental health issues in their lifetime, according to the charity Mind. It’s almost a dead cert that the man who caused last night’s incident, by climbing the wrong side of a barrier on an M5 bridge, was one of them. It’s also almost certain that you, or someone you love, will be too.

Perhaps it was a cry for help and he never meant to jump? If it was, fortunately, it worked and our emergency services, who I think handled the whole situation brilliantly, got him what he needed. By the way, the police and paramedics were also looking out for you, appealing on social media for information on anyone stuck in the traffic queue who needed medical attention or assistance of any other kind.

The man who caused the incident is now in the hands of professional NHS staff who spend their days dealing with situations so difficult you and I would struggle to imagine them. And while they do it every single working day while you were inconvenienced for an absolute maximum of four hours.

I can understand it’s frustrating but instead of getting on with your evening you chose to take to social media and post a vile comment. Unfortunately you weren’t the only one.

Natalie, I’ve not published your surname here because it seems unfair, (although I’m not sure why, you published it on social media for everyone to see) and the comment is hidden so people can't see it.

This comment and others’ show that as a society we’ve got a long way to go to understand and deal with this problem.

From your Facebook picture you look young. Perhaps you haven’t had your almost inevitable brush with mental illness yet. Perhaps when you do you’ll become like the dozens who posted messages of support for this poor man? Perhaps you’ll grow up to be like the woman who stopped me by the side of the motorway last night to ask if he was OK? Perhaps you’ll be moved to volunteer for the Samaritans or train as a medical professional?

Perhaps you’ll have at 70 the same attitude towards the ill and unfortunate as you do today? If so, I hope our paths never cross.