Suicide Prevention Programs, Do They Work?

A few weeks ago, the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper carried another sad story about youth suicide. This is a story that is still unfortunately all too common. It is a story that we would all like to never see again. We all would like to be able to prevent youth suicide.

Unfortunately we are not very good at that yet. Hopefully we are getting better at it. A recent guest editorial by Dr. Alan Apter in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry ( Suicidal Behavior in Adolescence: 55: 271-273; 2010) pointed out that despite the plethora of so called suicide prevention programs we really have very little good evidence that any of them work. Or even that they may do no harm.

And these programs are very popular. Not only are they offered to individuals and organizations that think they are learning how to prevent suicide, but I understand that some health organizations and governments have mandated their application. And they are not inexpensive. I recently looked on the website of one of these so called “suicide prevention” programs and it was being offered for one hundred and sixty dollars per person! 

Recently our research group conducted an exhaustive and intensive assessment of the evidence that one of the most commonly used community suicide prevention programs actually prevents suicide. And, in contrast to the advertising, we were not able to find any substantive evidence that this was the case! We are in the process of writing up this research and will publish our findings in the next little while.

So what are we to do? Well, we should at least do what there some evidence of effectiveness for. We need to educate teachers and health care providers to better identify, refer and provide effective treatments for young people who develop a mental disorder. Will doing this prevent all youth suicides? Unfortunately not, but it would be a good start. And we need to do some good solid scientifically sound research to see if programs that say they prevent suicide actually do prevent suicide, before we spend a ton of public money on them.

--Stan