Yesterday, I wrote a little bit about a really insightful technical package offered by the Centers for Disease Control. It’s a long document, but for those of you who care about how we can stop suicide and are looking for ideas (if you are involved in the government or not!), I think it’s a great read.
I don’t want to get insanely in-depth into what sort of recommendations were contained in the document. But I do think it’s worth reviewing the broad outlines of it, just in case you don’t have time to read a 60 page governmental white paper. Broadly speaking, it broke down it’s recommended solutions into a few categories:
- Strengthening Economic Supports: This one was the topic of my entry yesterday, and I’d argue the most important for both suicide and protecting vulnerable people in our society. This specifically deals with making sure that people who may be at risk for suicide as a result of economic conditions have access to the services that they need to recover, and includes items like robust unemployment benefits, medical benefits, foreclosure assistance and more.
- Strengthen Access & Delivery of Suicide Care: Here’s where things start to align with what I think most people would expect. This includes the obvious systemic changes needed to be made to our mental health system, including improvements to the insurance system (parity between physical and mental health), reducing provider shortages (a huge issue of mine which, unfortunately, largely needs to be dealt with at the federal level), and broader changes to the mental health care system in order to better address mental illness and suicide prevention.
- Create Protective Environments: Here’s where what I’ll call “stop-gap” methods really come into play. This includes means reduction (guns are huge issue here, but this also includes restricting access to suicide hotspots) and improving organizational/social systems to promote protective environments (particularly in at risk locations) and addressing excess alcohol use (which is connected to suicide).
- Promoting Connectedness: Thanks to phones and technology, we are more connected than ever before. Except we’re not. And as social connectedness breakdown, suicide rates will continue to increase. This specific approach recommends addressing suicide by establishing peer norm programs and engaging in increased community engagement activities.
- Teaching Coping & Problem Solving Skills: One of the keys to surviving any bout of mental illness – and I’ve written about it before – is building resilience, or an ability to cope. This includes creating social/emotional learning programs and addressing parenting and family relation skills.
- Identify and Support People at Risk: This includes training gatekeepers, improving crisis intervention and broad-based treatment for people at risk of suicide.
- Postvention: The aftermath of a suicide attempt can have a dramatic impact on both the victim and those around them. This section of the report deals with postvention for those who were close with a suicide victim and addresses safe reporting/messaging in the aftermath of a suicide.
This is really comprehensive, and again, worth a read. If you have any thoughts or questions, I’d love to hear them! Leave your questions or comments in the section below.
Mike Schlossberg - Author 