Home Subscribe Login Contact Us

Quick Links:

Articles About The Journal Editorial Staff Reprint Permission Manuscript Submission Review Guidelines Ethics Statement Publication Contract Subscribe to JHHSA

Latest News:

Call for papers: Emerging Trends in Public & Nonprofit Organizations

ASPA's Academic Women in Public Administration (AWPA) has partnered with JHHSA to initiate a discussion on emerging health and human service trends in public and nonprofit institutions. This symposium seeks scholarship with an eye to creating resilience. Thoughtful empirical and theoretical research that turns a critical eye on what institutions are doing to navigate these challenging times. Please see the attached call for details on how to contribute your scholarship.

More Information

JHHSA Articles

Suicid Prevention: A Vital National Public Health Issue

BARBARA D'ORIO and STEVEN J. GARLOW
JHHSA, Vol. 27 No. 2, (2004)

Suicide continues to be a major public health problem in the United States, with 30,000 deaths per year. The suicide rate, which hovers around 10-12/100,000 has remained virtually unchanged over the past three decades. In 1999 the Surgeon General proposed a national plan to serve as a roadmap toward developing a comprehensive national suicide prevention strategy. The key features of this plan were encapsulated in the acronym AIM, Awareness, Intervention, and Methodology, to define the relevant components of a national strategy. This refers to increasing public awareness of the problem of mental illness and suicide, providing increased access to treatment and prevention resources and developing improved research methodologies. Despite the overall numbers, suicide is a low base-rate event, which makes studying intervention and prevention strategies very difficult, as very large subject samples are required for meaningful outcome assessments. Suicide prevention and prevention research have received substantially fewer public resources than many other medical conditions, and apparent public health risks such as bioterrorism. It is for this reason that a comprehensive, national public health based suicide prevention program is required.

Subscribers: Login to read this article

Guests: Subscribe to JHHSA, or purchase individual article access for $10.
The article is not available for automatic download. We will email the article to you as a PDF file upon receiving your payment, typically within 24 hours.