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Integrated Settings: An Opportunity for Advancing the Care of Patients at Risk for Suicide
The integration of primary care and behavioral health affords settings the ability to better identify and manage patients at risk for suicide. Each year in the United States 35,000 people die by suicide, a large majority of whom are not engaged in the mental health system and who saw their primary...
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NIMH Director’s Blog: A New Research Agenda for Suicide Prevention
More than 38,000 Americans died by suicide in 2010, the most recent year for which we have national data. This makes suicide, once again, the tenth leading cause of death for all ages; the second leading cause of death for young adults ages 25 to 34.1 Despite changes in recent decades that might...
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Suicide in the Military: Army NIH-Funded Study Points to Risk and Protective Factors
The largest study of mental health risk and resilience ever conducted among U.S. military personnel today released its first findings related to suicide attempts and deaths in a series of three JAMA Psychiatry articles. Findings from The Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers...
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Suicide Prevention: Creating an Agency-Wide Response
FEGS Health & Human Services, a large and diverse organization serving 100,000 individuals annually, provides a full array of behavioral services through community-based treatment, rehabilitation, care coordination programs and residential and housing services to over 25,000 people a year. We...
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River Angel: Therapy and Loss in the Early Days of AIDS
It’s been 17 years since Keith Braverman* washed down a bottle of valium with a fifth of vodka, left his wallet and keys on his kitchen table, and jumped into the Hudson River. Keith wrote one suicide note, and it was addressed to me. He attached a postcard to the note: the two embracing angels...
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Understanding Suicide in New York City: The Scope of the Problem and Opportunities for Prevention
In the past two decades, New York City has seen a decline in overall suicide rates.1 The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) recently announced that the suicide rate in NYC is approximately half that of the national suicide rate.1 Yet, the actual number of suicides is high:...
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Recognizing Suicide Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) encompasses five developmental disorders including Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, Pervasive Developmental disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), Rett’s Disorder, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (CDD). According to the National Institute of...
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Working with Adolescents and Their Families in the Immediate Aftermath of a Suicide Attempt
Terror, anger, confusion, anxiety, and desperation are some of the feelings that family members express following a suicide attempt by a young adolescent. The mental health worker who has been working with the teen may be left to wonder - “What did I miss? What didn’t I do? What didn’t I see?...
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Are Bridges Suicide Magnets? They Don’t Have to Be!
Bridges are suicide magnets. But they don’t have to be. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge has the unfortunate distinction of being the most popular suicide destination in the world. It has been the scene of 1,500 deaths by suicide, approximately 30 per year. Results from a comprehensive...
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National Action Alliance on Suicide Prevention Receives Suicide Care Report from Clinical Care and Intervention Task Force
Michael F. Hogan, PhD, Commissioner of the New York State Office of Mental Health co-chairs the Clinical Care and Intervention Task Force of the National Action Alliance on Suicide Prevention. In August of 2011 the Task Force completed a sweeping report entitled “Suicide Care in Systems...
