Suicide Prevention

Suicide prevention is an umbrella term for the collective efforts of local citizen organizations, mental health practitioners and related professionals to reduce the incidence of suicide. Beyond just direct interventions to stop an impending suicide, methods also involve a) treating the psychological and psychophysiological symptoms of depression, b) improving the coping strategies of persons who would otherwise seriously consider suicide, c) reducing the prevalence of conditions believed to constitute risk factors for suicide, and d) giving people hope for a better life after current problems are resolved.

General efforts have included preventive and proactive measures within the realms of medicine and mental health, as well as public health and other fields. Because protective factors such as social support and connectedness, as well as environmental risk factors such as access to lethal means, appear to play significant roles in the prevention of suicide, suicide should not be viewed solely as a medical or mental health issue.

In the U.S., suicide prevention efforts are guided by the U.S. National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, published by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2001. Suicide prevention interventions fall into two broad categories: prevention targeted at the level of the individual and prevention targeted at the level of the population. The purpose of the Best Practices Registry (BPR) is to identify, review, and disseminate information about best practices to address specific objectives of the National Strategy.