I was so glad to see that Janis Whitlock, who usually writes about self-injury on her Psychology Today blog "Youth and Consequences," post her reaction to the recent suicide deaths at Cornell University.
In fact, I wish that I'd read her post when it first came out last week, when I was in Sin City at a conference with suicide prevention advocates from across the country looking for a focus for a blog post that never got written.
As I am at many conferences, I found myself smitten, just starry-eyed, in presentations on the latest research on suicide prevention and mental health promotion. One presentation in particular, by the Centers for Disease Control's Alex Crosby, was a forerunner for a blog post. Dr. Crosby talked about the CDC's research findings on connectedness at about the same time as Dr. Whitlock wrote about this research on her blog.
"Those individuals and institutions to which each of us is connected," writes Whitlock, "are the places where both our suffering and our healing happen...[s]uicide is as much a cultural disease as it is a biologically-based mental disorder...Preventing suicide starts at home, in schools, and in communities - not when someone's suffering becomes intractable."
"Moreover," she writes, "in the wake of repeated suicides and suicide prevention efforts we have learned another valuable lesson: we should not be preventing suicide. Instead, we should be promoting life. Research shows unequivocally that when we increase a sense of connectedness, belonging, meaning, and mattering, we decrease mental illness, including suicide."
Moving suicide prevention upstream is an idea that Dr. Whitlock and I can both stand behind. Please read her whole post and feel free to start a discussion here.
Copyright 2010 Elana Premack Sandler, All Rights Reserved
