Suicide Prevention—We Know What to Do but Will We Do It?

摘要

Reports of a public health event unprecedented in a high-income, industrialized nation first appeared in 2016. Absent war, famine, disease outbreak, or significant sociopolitical upheaval, life expectancy in the United States began to decline. Subsequent analyses reported in identified this decline as resulting from a cluster of interrelated public health outcomes that included alcohol- and opiate-related mortality and death by suicide and posited a shared set of social determinants for these deaths of despair as a health inequity identified in only 9 of 48 US subpopulations. Elsewhere, such patterns of disease interaction and underlying shared social determinants have been defined as syndemic. Responding to the research, an editorial explored what is known about this epidemic of suicide and interrelated conditions and questioned “What to do?”