Keynote SpeakerJamie Coupe

Jamie Karl Coupe is a Suicide Prevention and Masculine Mental Health Specialist working at the front line of youth mental health in the UK. Since November 2024 he has stood in front of more than 2,000 pupils across leading UK schools and universities, delivering science-backed, technology-informed talks and workshops that schools describe as some of the most engaging suicide prevention work their students have ever experienced. He is listed and endorsed by the HMC (Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference).

Jamie nearly did not make it to adulthood, and that experience is the engine behind everything he does. He built The 10 Pillars Test and founded Primal Grace because the picture for young people, and particularly young men, is stark: suicide remains the leading cause of death in men under 50, and adolescent boys are the demographic least likely to ask for help. Young people referred to CAMHS routinely wait months for support at exactly the moment they need it most. Jamie’s work exists to close those gaps — practically, urgently, and at scale — until no young person is left waiting or struggling alone.

His positioning is deliberate. As a young, athletic, privately-educated man, he is the messenger young men actually recognise as one of their own, and that recognition is the unlock. Schools repeatedly report the same thing: their boys lean in, ask the questions they don’t ask anywhere else, and keep talking to each other long after he has left the room. There is a myth that you cannot talk to teenagers about suicide without the room turning heavy and silent. Jamie’s sessions prove otherwise — students laugh, smile, ask questions no one saw coming, and participate as though their lives depend on it, because for some of them it just might.

What sets Jamie apart from other speakers in this field is that he doesn’t just talk about prevention — he has built a tool for it. The 10 Pillars Test is a free, technology-informed suicide prevention app, developed from his Primal Grace framework and featured by Bristol City Council, and available now on the App Store. It is designed to do the one thing traditional services often cannot: meet a young person in the exact moment they need support — privately, instantly, without judgement, and without a waiting list. Rather than asking a teenager to name what is wrong, the app invites them to identify which of the ten pillars of wellbeing — sleep, movement, purpose, connection and the rest — they can strengthen this week. That reframing converts a conversation boys typically avoid into a practical, agency-driven self-audit, and gives schools quantifiable, real-time evidence of impact.

Privacy is built in by design: the app stores nothing centrally — every wellbeing score lives only on the young person’s own device and is never transmitted or shared. Co-designed with the young people it is for, including the Bristol City Youth Council, it has been downloaded and used by students before a workshop has even finished. At Royal Grammar School Guildford, in front of 140 Year 10 boys, Jamie watched one student quietly check in on himself with the app, right there in the room. That is exactly what it was built for.

In schools, Jamie offers a coordinated, whole-school approach — what he calls “suicide-proofing your school” — designed to satisfy the 2027 RSHE statutory guidance on Suicide Prevention Training and the September 2026 mandatory misogyny and radicalisation education, while genuinely shifting outcomes for the students in the room. This spans student talks and workshops (predominantly Years 9 to 13), staff training that equips teachers, tutors, pastoral leads and counsellors to spot risk early and respond well, leadership programmes for heads and governors, and parent and carer seminars so the work does not stop at the school gate. Every strand is paired with the app, so wellbeing outcomes can be tracked in real time.

Jamie’s practice is built on clinical training, mentorship from internationally recognised practitioners, and frontline experience across schools, sports academies, councils and justice settings. He has undertaken affiliated training and study with Middlesex University, Iron Mill College and ACM, alongside ongoing CPD in working with children and young people experiencing depression, supervised within an established counselling psychology framework. He has been mentored over many years by a deliberately chosen lineage of practitioners and thinkers including Oliver Chittenden, Daniele Bolelli, Charlie Cannon and Hamish Mackay-Lewis, bringing together psychology, philosophy, embodiment and rites-of-passage work for young men.

He is the founder of Primal Grace — the framework and movement behind his work, built on a single non-negotiable belief: no struggle has to end in silence. His vision is Zero Youth Suicide Worldwide, and his strategy for getting there is unfashionably simple. Go to where the work is needed. Build tools young people will actually use. Speak to young men in a language they recognise. Train the adults around them to hold the line. Measure the outcomes. Repeat.