If someone you know is expressing suicidal thoughts or talking about suicide, take it seriously and help them connect with services. Removing access to lethal items is a key prevention strategy.
Long-term support can also help, such as encouraging coping skills and helping people build connections with others through community programs and other activities.
Risk Factors
Many factors can contribute to suicide, including mental health conditions like depression and bipolar disorder. Risk factors can also include a history of suicide attempts and childhood trauma. Environmental factors can include long periods of stress, financial strain and major life events. Access to lethal means of self-harm, such as pills and firearms, can also increase the risk of suicide.
Protective factors can include social connections, good problem-solving skills and the ability to seek help when needed. They can also include cultural or religious beliefs that discourage suicide, and access to quality mental and physical healthcare services.
It’s important to note that a person can experience suicidal thoughts or behaviors even without having any risk factors. And, while risk factors can help identify those who are at increased risk, they cannot explain why someone has or will attempt suicide. This is because each person’s experience and circumstances are unique. However, identifying risk factors can help us identify warning signs that may be helpful in targeting people who might benefit from care and support.
Prevention Strategies
There are a number of effective strategies for suicide prevention. Many of these are focused on treating mental health conditions that predispose people to suicide and reducing risk factors such as substance use, depression, anxiety, poor self-concept, impulsivity and difficulty coping with stressful life events. Other preventive strategies include encouraging people to build resilience, such as through skills training, self-help materials and support groups, and building community connections, such as by using social programs targeted at specific population groups or through promoting emotional supportive relationships.
Restricting access to lethal means of suicide and addressing societal risk factors, such as unsafe media portrayals of suicide and stigma associated with seeking help, are also important. However, these interventions require large population studies, such as those conducted at the city, county or general practitioner network level, in order to be able to evaluate their effectiveness and identify scalable evidence-based approaches.
Interventions
Health care workers face unique challenges including working long hours on rotating or irregular shifts, frequent exposure to suffering and death and access to lethal means (CDC, 2022). Studies suggest that effective interventions to reduce suicide risk for health care workers can include reducing stigma and improving access and availability of behavioral health services.
Brief interventions have been shown to be effective at preventing suicide during times of high risk. For example, safety planning involves a person creating a plan with their therapist, identifying actions they might take during a mental health crisis and other methods of self-suicide prevention, and determining with their therapist how to implement and monitor the plan during periods of high risk. It can be facilitated through a telehealth setting or through one of many available apps.
Teaching life skills and building resilience are other preventive measures that can reduce suicidal thoughts and behavior. These can be delivered through a variety of mechanisms such as skill training, mobile apps, and outreach campaigns.
Recovery
In the aftermath of suicide, some survivors experience a period of intense grief and anger. Other people may develop post-traumatic stress disorder, in which the trauma is involuntarily relived as intrusive thoughts. People who experience a suicide attempt may also have feelings of guilt and shame. These feelings often make it hard for them to open up about the event to loved ones.
Identify the person’s risk factors and help them make a safety plan. This might include a list of sources of support, self-soothing activities, reasons for living and safe people to call. It might also include a plan for what to do in the event of a crisis. Keep potential means of suicide out of the home, including medications and knives. Limit the amount of alcohol in the house, and only give pain relievers to children in small quantities.
Ask your school or workplace if it has a suicide prevention team, and find out what they do. Also, see if they offer training for all staff to recognise warning signs.