Preventing suicide requires addressing both risk and protective factors. Risk factors include mental health disorders, hopelessness, substance abuse, a history of violence victimization or perpetration, and social isolation. Protective factors include supportive relationships and community connectedness.
You can help by asking if someone is considering suicide and listening without judgment. You can also help them connect to 988 and community resources.
1. Reduce Access to Lethal Means
Many people who commit suicide use lethal means, so reducing access to those methods can save lives. Means restriction is an essential part of a comprehensive suicide prevention strategy. It may include distributing gun locks, educating families and clinicians about how to safely store firearms, limiting the size of pill bottles, removing barriers from bridges or other high risk sites, putting warning signs in schools, erecting suicide barrier fences on military bases and restricting the availability of ligature points.
Family members and others who are concerned about a loved one’s suicidal thoughts should ask them about the way they plan to kill themselves and find out how they are storing weapons, medications and other items. Watch out for dramatic changes in behavior, such as avoiding friends or family, withdrawing from activities they once enjoyed, showing an interest in death or suicide, sleeping all the time or developing a sudden unexplained happiness.
People in crisis who don’t seek help on their own are at highest risk of suicide. Gatekeeper interventions like suicide screening and teaching warning signs and increasing the availability of help include mental health services, suicide hotlines, mobile crisis teams and walk-in crisis clinics.
2. Identify People at Risk
Suicide can be prevented by teaching coping and problem-solving skills, promoting emotional support, expanding options for temporary assistance and connecting people at risk to effective mental health care. Schools can implement suicide prevention programs, community organizations can provide wellness activities and businesses can promote employee assistance programs.
Those at highest risk of suicide often have mental illnesses, such as depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, or addictions such as drug or alcohol abuse. A person may also have a history of childhood trauma or major life crisis (the death of a loved one, divorce/break-up, job loss, diagnosis of a terminal illness).
When someone is at high risk, it’s important to ask if they are considering suicide and be there for them. Studies have shown that asking and being there for a person does not increase their risk of suicide or their suicidal thoughts. In fact, increasing connectedness (both in the short and long-term) has been shown to be a protective factor against suicide.
3. Build Life Skills
Those who have suicidal thoughts can learn positive life skills that promote well-being and resilience. Person-centered life skills training can include problem-solving strategies; coping with stress and negative emotions like sadness, hopelessness or anger; and healthy lifestyle behaviors such as exercise that improves mood and sleep.
Prevention professionals can build life skills by helping people to find and access help in times of crisis. This can include fostering community-wide help-seeking behaviors, providing accessible information on how to get assistance, and creating protective environments that include substance use prevention.
School districts can play a key role in preventing suicide by promoting life skills and offering mental health education. They can also help a student’s family to understand their child’s mental health needs and the warning signs of suicide. Several resources are available to aid educators with safe classroom discussions of suicide including SPC-NY’s Talking Points for Classroom Presentations and NYSED’s Social Emotional Learning Implementation Guidance Document.
4. Enhance Connectedness
A lack of social connections is a risk factor for suicide. Community-based efforts to increase connectedness are one component of a comprehensive approach to suicide prevention. These include activities that promote positive and supportive relationships and community connections as protective factors, such as social programs targeted to specific populations (e.g., older adults and LGBTQ youth), and volunteerism opportunities.
A person in emotional pain may not know that help is available or that it’s okay to ask for it. Creating an environment where people feel comfortable discussing their emotional pain, mental health and suicidal thoughts in a nonjudgmental and supportive manner is an important upstream element of preventing suicide.
Addressing these complex issues requires a broad network of public and private sector partners across communities. This approach is called upstream prevention and it can lead to measurable, sustained impacts. A comprehensive approach to preventing suicide includes efforts in schools, workplaces, hospitals, local businesses, community organizations and law enforcement settings.