In 2023, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death, accounting for 1.4 in 10,000 individuals, or 1.70 million suicide attempts in the year. Those statistics are tragic and every one of them is a person who might have lived if they had better resources, better education, and more help improving quality of life. Today, we know that suicide prevention more and more often requires constant intervention, help with living, and outreach before suicidal ideation (suicidal thoughts) become a reality. Yet, many of us don’t know how to reach out to get medical help, wait lists for therapists are not helpful in getting treatment for feeling suicidal now, and 56% of suicide attempts are fatal. That means we need local, organized support for individuals struggling with suicidal thoughts.
Often, that means community-based suicide prevention. Here, the community comes together to offer support inside the community, often a neighborhood or large building, with assigned people responsible, training, information, and a means of escalating people to counseling and support in case community support is not enough.
Community-based suicide prevention is often defined as non-clinical efforts led by community members such as individuals with experience, leaders, or gatekeepers. This means it is comprised of amateurs who have (hopefully) received some training but who are primarily able to help by having experience and by knowing the community.
Often this means that the individuals involved must know their community, must be able to identify needs, and must be able to get along with and understand the diverse cultures in their community. That also often means having education to help them understand what drives suicide, what quality of life looks like and what wellbeing looks like, and the different approaches to getting to the same result of improved quality of life and mental health outlook.
In short, community-based suicide prevention can mean a lot of things. For a few people, it means learning semi-clinical interventions and being able to deliver those. For most of the community, it means that learning about suicide, destigmatizing it, and being available to offer a helping hand when someone isn’t managing self-care or childcare.
Community support stands out because it means that the people who see how you are doing every day have the opportunity to reach out, to ask if you need help, and to offer support in whatever way you need it. In most cases that means pre-clinical support, social support, self-help talking support, and living assistance.
Eventually, all of these interventions will make a big difference to someone struggling with mental health.
Many medical suicide interventions are geared around treating persons who have attempted and failed suicide. Today, little other than therapy exists for individuals experiencing suicidal ideation. Emergency care does not exist for persons experiencing ideation. Yet, research shows that the most significant impact on long-term suicide risk is in having interventions available for people before they attempt suicide.
Having community-based suicide programs in place means those interventions are available, accessible, and affordable.
At the same time, it’s important to ensure that community-based suicide intervention is seen as a step one. If someone needs mental health help and therapy, they should be encouraged to move towards it, the community should help to provide resources like education, assistance with planning, etc. Therapy and treatment can be extremely powerful interventions and can mean that community efforts like living assistance and self-help groups have the space to make a difference in keeping someone in a healthy state, rather than maintaining their current state. Essentially, you need both – despite the fact that community interventions can be extremely powerful in helping people to improve quality of life and reduce chances of suicide.
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