The Casual Sadism of Suicide Prevention
Most efforts are aimed at kicking the can down the road, not reducing suicidal feelings
There was another article about suicide prevention in The NY Times today, on the remarkably long journey to get a suicide barrier constructed on the Golden Gate Bridge, which has been a temple to killing one’s self for decades. Back in 2019, the NYT opinion section—with a psychiatrist writing— referred to “the empty promise of suicide prevention.” I often dunk on the Times, but this was accurate:
If suicide is preventable, why are so many people dying from it? Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and suicide rates just keep rising.
This was a “no brainer”— death by suicide has long been an outcome determined by the lethality of the means at hand. Men die by suicide more often than women1 in the US, largely because males tend to reach for easily accessible and fatal firearms. In rural China, women lead the way to death by suicide, with organophosphate pesticides result available and highly lethal.2
The focus on prevention of death—as the only positive story…