The CDC’s National Suicide Prevention program is generating new interest in developing evidence-based approaches to suicide prevention through its Comprehensive Suicide Prevention Initiative (CSP) over the next five years. The CSP is a mechanism for states, territories and tribes to receive funding from CDC to adopt a public health approach to preventing suicide and not just rely upon crisis intervention after a suicide occurs. A primary goal of the initiative is to decrease suicide death rates and suicide attempt rates by 10% for specific population groups with higher rates of suicide than the general population (i.e., veterans, tribal communities, rural areas, LGBTQ youth and adolescents).
The CSP does not focus on just single event prevention campaigns but supports prevention efforts that are part of a continuum of care by adding multiple strategies to prevent suicide such as creating more economic supports, reducing access to lethal means, improving social connectedness, promoting help-seeking behaviours and providing postvention services after a suicide attempt. In order for jurisdictions to create their own data collection systems, test different prevention strategies and share successful implementation of proven prevention methods, the CSP will provide approximately $21 million each year through cooperative agreements with jurisdictions.
At the local level, a comprehensive suicide prevention program would involve coordinating school-based education on youth suicide prevention with firearm safety partnerships, promoting the crisis line, training primary care providers in youth suicide prevention, and creating peer-led youth recovery groups, rather than having them operate independently of one another.
The designers of these programs increasingly include survivors and their families in order to ensure that the design will be consistent with the values of compassion, nonjudgmental behavior, and cultural awareness. The overall suicide rate remains high in many parts of the United States, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sees the success of this suicide prevention program as critical to achieving the national goal of reducing suicide rates by 20% by 2025 and thereafter. Therefore, all members of each community are urged to view suicide prevention as a shared responsibility; it will not only be the mental health delivery system’s responsibility for preventing suicides.
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