In the last month I read a really interesting book about suicide prevention and would like to share some of the highlights with you for this month’s blog entry. The book is “Rethinking Suicide: Why Prevention Fails, and How We Can Do Better” by Craig J. Bryan.
While the book is worth reading for more of the details, I wanted to point out a few major themes. The first is that mental illness does not likely explain the vast majority of suicide attempts and/or completions. While some resources will suggest that up to 90% of suicides are traced to a mental illness (either before the suicide or presumed after the suicide), that number may be much lower. The author highlights several cases of someone attempting or dying by suicide where the post-event analysis cannot find any diagnosable mental illness that would be correlated to the suicidal event. This makes suicide prevention more challenging, of course, because there is plenty of evidence to suggest that suicide doesn’t require some type of mental illness. It is theorized that suicide is the result of many different factors coming together all at once, and unfortunately we haven’t figured out all of the numerous factors that can play into suicide.
The second major theme is that we should start to look at suicide prevention more from a systems perspective instead of an individual one. The example that the author gives as a model is automobile safety. Instead of focusing solely on individual factors, we have improved safety features on cars and have laws related to mandatory seat belt use for everyone. A systems approach to suicide prevention mentioned by the author included “means restriction”, with examples such as locking up guns and engineering that prevents people from jumping off bridges.
There is so much great information in this book, and I have only scratched the surface. I encourage you to read it and see if it challenges you to “rethink suicide”.