EXPERTS CALL FOR INCREASED SUICIDE RESEARCH, PREVENTION

WASHINGTON - Federal agency leaders and mental health experts today called for increased public action on suicide, an immense public health issue that they say is often and too easily overlooked.

At a briefing about the issue on Capitol Hill, Charles G. Curie, administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, announced a three-year, $2.5 million annual grant to establish a national suicide prevention resource center, which will provide aid in implementing prevention programs. The center would be housed at the Education Development Center in Newton, Mass.

Approximately 30,000 Americans commit suicide a year and countless more attempt it. International statistics put the number of suicide deaths at around 1 million a year, but experts expect that social taboos and under-funded surveillance systems make this number a gross underestimate.

Statistics indicate that there are three suicide deaths every hour in America and, on average, one suicide attempt occurs every minute. Yet many obstacles remain to reducing the number of suicides in the United States and around the world.

"Suicide and suicidal behaviors are preventable," said Eve Slater, M.D., assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Recent years have seen a slight decline in suicides.

Future surveillance programs will include new questions to improve data gathering on rates of suicide and attempted suicide. Public and private partnerships will also increase the focus on this public health issue, she said.

This is in stark contrast to the historical research approach, which excluded individuals who were at risk of committing suicide, said Richard K. Nakamura, Ph.D., acting director of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

"Individuals are safer in clinical trials than out of them," said Charles F. Reynolds III, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He said that including suicidal patients in research studies is not only ethical, it is necessary.

People are still uncomfortable talking about suicide, just as they were 20 years ago when talking about breast, ovarian or prostate cancer, said Harvard's Arthur M. Kleinman, M.D., a co-chair of Institute of Medicine's Committee on Pathophysiology & Prevention of Adolescent & Adult Suicide.

"Prevention of suicide is in its very early days," Kleinman said, especially compared with heart disease, where an enormous amount of research funding is invested in better understanding the causes and strategies for reducing risk.

While health care providers need to take a leading role in the effort to prevent suicides through identifying and treating people at acute risk, education within schools and other community settings is also pivotal as a prevention strategy, the experts said.

The recent Institute of Medicine report, "Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative" lays out several priorities for improving research and prevention and can serve as a blueprint for a national strategy, said Curie. The IOM report is available online at http://books.nap.edu/books/0309083214/html/index.html.

Health Behavior News Service: (202) 387-2829 or www.hbns.org.
Facts of Life, "Preventing Suicide: Individual Acts Create a Public Health Crisis": www.cfah.org/factsoflife/vol7no8.cfm.