For anyone to get to the point where they are standing on the ledge of a motorway bridge , saying their life isn’t worth living, something has gone heartbreakingly wrong.

Equally if you are discovered wandering around in a daze on a rush-hour carriageway, having disappeared from a psychiatric unit, you are in need of help and treatment.

We have written about women in both these desperate crises over the last fortnight, but not because they were receiving help.

The stories came about because both of them were prosecuted for their actions.

In each case, police charged them for disrupting traffic. They were hauled before the courts, told off, and sent away, one of them straight back into psychiatric care.

It was the patronising quotes from the magistrates in the first case - a grieving teenager who had threatened to jump on six occasions - that really made me shudder.

Having been told that her actions had closed the motorway for 20 minutes, the bench issued her with a community order and a £200 fine.

She was told to ‘use this well to deal with your bereavement’ - her mother had died. Mental health is as simple as that, apparently.

But they weren’t done.

(Image: Reading Titles)

"This has caused a massive inconvenience to the public and no-one wants to be subject to this sort of inconvenience,” she was told.

"You must move forward with your life. This sort of behaviour doesn’t cause anyone any good, least of all you.

"Don't find yourself in breach of payments or not attending appointments with probation.

"If you do, you will find yourself back in court and you don't want to be back here, do you?"

An inconvenience. Which is how many people with mental health problems feel in the first place.

Before I get to the ins and outs of charging people for being suicidal, and why the police do it, let's talk about compassion.

I’m not equating myself to either woman - I’ve never been suicidal and I can’t imagine how black that must feel - but I do know the impact a cold and disinterested system can have.

Two and a half years ago, my own dad died. My mental health slid. I didn’t want to get out of bed and frequently didn't.

I wasn’t interested in seeing anyone. Everything seemed pointless, joyless, a barren, flat landscape of nothing.

(Image: Lisa Barnes)

Eventually, I went to the GP after a friend talked me into it. But I was scared, so I booked in for some minor ailment or other. At the end of the appointment, I plucked up the courage and the words all came tumbling out in a rush: I don’t care about anything, I’m grieving, I can’t cope.

The GP literally did not look up. She said nothing. Before I’d even finished speaking, she had passed me a piece of paper with an email address on it for self-help referral.

I walked away so defeated, so numb that I had built up all the courage and energy to speak to someone... and they just didn’t care. (I should add - and this is a topic for another day - that asking mentally ill people to refer themselves for help is an absolute joke.)

I know how common my experience is, just from talking to people I know. And because when we did a survey on life in Greater Manchester in 2017 , the question about depression and anxiety prompted floods and floods of responses. People simply did not feel like the system was there for them.

Which brings me to the police charging suicidal people. It’s not good enough to blame officer cuts. While I write week in, week out about the effects of austerity, and the horrendous difficulties public bodies are facing on the ground, that can’t justify these charges.

They don’t even make any practical sense. Who, exactly, did this help? If anybody thinks it will act as a deterrent, they need to educate themselves about suicide.

My understanding is that in one of the cases, the police had hoped that by taking the woman to court, she might get an order that would effectively ensure that she would finally get the treatment she needed. Misguided, but perhaps you can see the logic. (That’s not actually what happened, incidentally - she got a conditional discharge.)

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

And yet the whole point about Greater Manchester is that it is meant to work together as one system, including mental health services with police.

Leaders talk a lot about joined-up working, about doing things differently. If that's the case, police should surely not have to take people through the courts in order to get them out their door and through another.

Neither is it enough to say, as the mayor’s office did this week, that such charges are ‘in the majority of cases’ only used as a last resort.

Either you think this is OK or you don’t. Either you're in charge of this stuff, or you're not.

Until the entire system - GPs, police, magistrates, politicians, everyone involved - actually understands the reality of mental health problems, then many people with all levels of illness, ranging all the way from mild depression to the bleakest of suicidal thoughts, will continue to be let down.

For while mental health campaigns aimed at educating the public are of course important, judging by the disgust with which our readers responded to these stories, I would suggest the public is actually already ahead of the system.