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Suicide prevention is important and effective

Edition No. 136
Dec. 2022
Suicide prevention

At first hand. I’m shocked by the fact that half a million people in Switzerland have suicidal thoughts – and that some of them may be people around me. How desperate must they be if ending their life seems to be the only way of liberating themselves from their situation.

Time and again I am horrified by how common false assumptions about suicide prevention are. I often hear, for example, that there is no point to suicide prevention because people who want to die will always find a way to end their lives.The first false assumption is that people with suicidal thoughts want to die. In most cases they don’t want to end their lives, they just want to put an end to their unbearable mental suffering.The second false assumption is that suicide cannot be prevented.

Evidently still too few people know that effective preventive measures exist. It is important to spread this knowledge because suicide prevention is a task for society as a whole and everyone can contribute to preventing suicide in their working and social environments. I am pleased that we are providing information about suicide prevention in this issue of spectra. There is still too little information about and discussion on this topic. As a society we must do our utmost to help people with suicidal thoughts and stop them turning thoughts into action in their desperation. It has been shown, for example, that measures that tackle structural framework conditions are effective. Here I am thinking of things like safety barriers erected on bridges, as has been done in Bern.This example clearly shows that suicide prevention is by no means a task for healthcare professionals alone – or for psychiatrists and psychologists alone, come to that. In this issue of spectra we want to show that effective suicide prevention can only be implemented if a wide range of measures covering various areas of policy are adopted in concert.There is still a lot to be done!

Contact

Anne Lévy
Director of the Federal Office of Public Health

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