Prevention Efforts Increasingly See Suicide Through a Broader Lens

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.” Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But that doesn’t make it normal. Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind — a mental illness. That’s led prevention efforts to typically focus on connecting people with treatment in moments of crisis. But that’s changing. There’s a growing movement asking a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person? During the covid pandemic, rates of anxiety and depression spiked — not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. People were out of work, isolated, struggling to make ends meet. That led many people in the mental health advocacy world to call for a broader approach. Treatments and crisis care are vital, they say, but the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live. Decades of research supports this idea. Interventions that improve