Epidemiology Needs to Inform Suicide Prevention Strategies

Dr. Brent's Master Clinician Review: Saving Holden Caulfield: Suicide Prevention in Children and Adolescents is a timely synthesis of evidence-based approaches to suicide reduction, including prevention strategies and programs, increased access to mental health care, changes in systems of care delivery, and means restriction.¹ Although this review appears in what is predominantly a journal for clinicians working in their offices or on hospital units, it is notable that most of the approaches he describes operate at primary or secondary prevention levels. That is, they use population-level strategies to prevent the development of suicide risk (primary prevention), or devise programs to detect and treat individuals before they become dangerously symptomatic (secondary prevention).