Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC): Suicide Prevention Basics Index

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Suicide Prevention Basics

This section was designed as an introduction to suicide and suicide prevention. Visit these pages to get quick facts, a brief history of major developments in suicide prevention, a glossary of relevant terms, and more.

The Public Health Approach to Preventing Suicide

The National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (NSSP) recommends the public health approach to preventing suicide as "a rational and organized way to marshal prevention efforts and ensure that they are effective." It distinguishes the public health approach, which identifies patterns of risk and behavior in groups of people, from the medical model, which focuses on individuals. The public health approach to suicide prevention, as presented in NSSP, has five basic steps:

Clearly define the problem, by collecting data and other information.
Identify risk and protective factors. Risk factors are associated with (or lead to) suicides and suicide attempts. Protective factors reduce the likelihood of suicide.
Develop and test interventions. Most interventions seek to reduce risk factors and/or enhance protective factors. Such preventive measures should be scientifically tested to determine if they actually work before being disseminated and implemented.
Implement interventions.
Evaluate effectiveness. Suicide prevention programs should always be evaluated to verify that they are working and to understand how to make them more effective in the particular situation in which they are being used.

Finally, if the interventions are actually having an effect, then additional data collection will help determine how the nature of the problem may be changing in response to those interventions. For example, it may be that an intervention which is successful at reducing suicide by one particular method, such as firearms, is contributing to an increase in the number of suicides by poison. Once the program has been re-defined, the cycle can repeat to address the new situation.

For more information on the public health approach to suicide prevention, see the Introduction to the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention as well as these publications:

Risk and Protective Factors for Suicide. (pdf) A 3-page document from SPRC.
Suicide Prevention: Prevention Effectiveness and Evaluation. (pdf) A 32-page guide from SPAN USA, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and Education Development Center, Inc.
Suicide Prevention: The Public Health Approach. (pdf) A 3-page document from SPRC.

The SPRC is supported by a grant (1 U79 SM57392-05) from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). No official endorsement by SAMHSA or DHHS for the information on this web site is intended or should be inferred.

The Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) is a project within EDC's (HHD)
55 Chapel Street, Newton, MA 02458 877-GET-SPRC (438-7772),

Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)