Suicide Epidemic

A death from suicide occurs every 43 seconds worldwide annually, according to an analysis published in The Lancet Public Health.

By addressing factors like health insurance coverage, internet access and income level, primary care providers can play an important role in suicide prevention, according to experts.

Since the turn of the century, organizations including the CDC and WHO have reported increasing suicide trends across the United States. Specifically, the CDC noted a 30% increase in suicide between 1999 and 2016. Globally, nearly 800,000 people die from suicide each year, and it remains the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29 years, according to WHO.

Oct. 10 is World Mental Health Day, and WHO has declared suicide prevention as the focus for 2019. According to WHO, someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds, and it chose this year’s theme “to raise awareness of the scale of suicide around the world and the role that each of us can play to help prevent it.”

Oct. 10 is World Mental Health Day, and WHO has declared suicide prevention as the focus for 2019. According to WHO, someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds, and it chose this year’s theme “to raise awareness of the scale of suicide around the world and the role that each of us can play to help prevent it.”

The current “one size fits all” approach to suicide prevention does not account for racial/ethnic minority groups, according to findings published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Suicide was the 10th leading cause of death overall in the U.S. in 2017, claiming more than 47,000 lives, according to the CDC.