Rethinking Suicide: Why Prevention Fails, and How We Can Do Better

An examination of how suicide prevention efforts largely fail due to the  mistaken assumption that greater mental health awareness is the key to  saving lives.

Over the last two decades, the US suicide rate has  steadily grown despite extensive awareness campaigns, wide  implementation of suicide prevention programs and initiatives, and  increased mental health advocacy. To the confusion and frustration of  researchers, healthcare providers, and many others, these efforts have  largely failed to reverse the trend. Why do suicide rates continue to  climb despite our best efforts? Why aren't we better at this? What are  we doing wrong?

Rethinking Suicide is a critical examination of  what we think we know about suicide, with particular focus on the  assumed role of mental illness. Craig J. Bryan, a leading expert on  suicide prevention, argues that most prevention efforts have failed  because they disproportionately emphasize mental health-focused  solutions such as access to treatment and crisis services. Instead of  classifying suicide as a mental health issue, careful analysis of  research findings suggest it should instead be seen as a highly complex  problem with many risk factors - from personal decision-making styles,  to the availability of lethal means, to financial uncertainty. As such  suicide rates will not be curtailed by conventional solution-oriented  thinking; rather, we need process-based thinking that may, in some  cases, defy or contradict many of our long-held assumptions about  suicide. Rethinking Suicide interweaves the author's firsthand  experiences with explanations of scientific findings to reveal the  limitations of widely-used practices and to introduce new perspectives  that may trigger a paradigm shift in how we understand and prevent  suicide.