This presentation will discuss the relevance of suicide models in fostering help-seeking. The challenge is to reach people who do not think that they need help, who believe that nobody will understand them, or who are afraid of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital against their will. In order to be meaningful to the person at risk, models of suicide must meet the person’s subjective experience of an emotional crisis with suicidal ideation. There is a conceptual mismatch between the suicidal person’s subjective experience of a suicidal crisis and the prevalent theory-based models of suicide. The medical model of suicide is not helpful for people in crisis or even for the general public to understand what can get people to end their lives by suicide. Public health projects must avoid using models that pathologize suicide. Psychoeducational projects focused on crisis processing and resolution, and person-centred psychological models are meaningful to people in a suicidal crisis. People should learn how and when suicidal thoughts and plans may become life threatening and when they need to seek help. However, where should people who seek help turn to? They need professional helpers that are open to collaboratively focus on an unconditional understanding of the person’s subjective experience. This in my view is the biggest challenge if we want to make help-seeking successful. It requires a change of paradigm in that health professionals can overcome the traditional role of being the experts of suicidality and adopt a truly person-centred approach to the suicidal person. In our clinical work we developed a model of suicide as an action, in contrast to models that understand suicide as a consequence of psychiatric disorders. The theory of goal-directed actions states that actions we perform have a personal background and that we explain actions with stories. In narrative interviewing, a major component of the Attempted Suicide Short Intervention Program ASSIP, the patient’s narrative is the key element for patient and helper to build a therapeutic alliance which creates insight and behavioural changes. The suicide-as-action model is easy to understand and meaningful to people at risk, and, what is most important, to health professionals. The presentation will describe projects related to this model, which aim to reach people at risk as well as health professionals.