Reducing Suicide Rates: Need for Public Health and Population Interventions

Recent studies from India have challenged the fact that the majority of the people who die by suicide have severe mental illness; they have demonstrated its frequent links to environmental stress, social, cultural, economic, and political correlates. Suicide, a complex phenomenon, is a final common pathway for a variety of causal etiologies. Nevertheless, psychiatry continues to argue for curative solutions based on the reductionistic biomedical model, rather than support public health measures to manage the larger sociocultural, economic, and political context. While psychiatry and curative medicine help many people in distress, specific mental health interventions are unlikely to impact secular trends in the rates of suicide. The reduction of population rates of suicide requires a range of public health measures.