Prevention Efforts Increasingly See Suicide Through a Broader Lens
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988”.
In the United States, someone commits suicide every 11 minutes. It’s so common. But that doesn’t make things normal.
Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people attempt suicide, something is wrong. Usually, it is assumed that something has happened in the person’s mind: a mental illness.
This has led prevention efforts to generally focus on connecting people with treatment in times of crisis.
But that is changing. There is a growing movement that asks a different question: What went wrong in the world around this person?
During the Covid pandemic, rates of anxiety and depression have increased – not because everyone’s brain chemistry has suddenly changed, but because the world has changed. People were unemployed, isolated and struggling to make ends meet.
This has led many in the mental health advocacy world to call for a broader approach. Treatment and crisis care are vital, they say, but the goal of suicide prevention must go beyond just stopping people from dying and also giving them reasons to live.
Decades of research support this idea. Interventions that improve people’s lives and prospects, such as running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or organizing weekly book clubs so housebound older people can make friends, can reduce suicide.
I spoke with Chris Pawelski, a fourth-generation farmer from Orange County, New York, for this story. He told me how the death of his father, caring for his mother with dementia, and the financial difficulties of his family’s onion farm led him to consider suicide.
“It’s everything that comes crashing down on you,” he said. “It takes weeks, months, years to deal with all kinds of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”
What helped him through this time wasn’t just family support and therapy. It was also an economic plan. He worked with an organization called NY FarmNet, which provided a free financial consultant who helped Pawelski transition from growing onions in bulk to a new model, growing a variety of produce to sell directly to consumers.
Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized and he and his wife are paying off their debts. He advocates programs to help others in similar situations.
That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help people deal with underlying challenges before a crisis hits.
“We need to think about a bigger, longer-term vision than a hotline,” he said. It’s “a bandage on a gunshot wound.”
In the United States, someone commits suicide every 11 minutes. This is a tragic and deep-rooted problem. A new approach to prevention shifts the focus from preventing harm in times of crisis to upstream policies that give people reasons to live.
