If Suicide is a Public Health Problem, What are we Doing to Prevent it?

Just as preventing heart disease once meant that specialists treated myocardial infarctions in emergency care settings, in the past decade, suicide prevention has been viewed as the responsbility of mental health professionals within clinical settings. By contrast, over the past 50 years, population-based risk reduction approaches have been used with varying levels of effectiveness to prevent morbidity & mortality associated with heart disease. The authors examined whether the current urgency to develop effective interventions for suicide prevention can benefit from an understanding of the evolution of population-based strategies to prevent heart disease. (123 refs.)