A Safer Environment Helps

A significant reason for our lack of progress in suicide prevention relates to our hyperfocus on mental illness, which has narrowed our thinking about suicide so much that we overlook the fact that suicides also occur among individuals without mental illness. We focus so much of our effort on trying to figure out who is going to kill themselves and trying to thwart the reasons why someone would want to kill themselves that we haven’t spent much time thinking about how people kill themselves. 

Means restriction methods work irrespective of the potential causes of suicide, and do not depend on our ability to predict who will attempt suicide or when suicidal behaviors will occur. Instead, means restriction focuses directly on reducing the lethality of suicidal behaviors, thereby increasing the likelihood that someone will survive a suicidal crisis, giving them a second chance.

Of those who survive a suicide attempt, the vast majority report feeling relieved that they were alive and regret making the attempt. Across 90 research studies that have followed suicide-attempt survivors for up to 10 years, around seven out of 10 people who attempted suicide and survived did not attempt suicide again and nine out of 10 did not go on to die by suicide. If someone survives their first suicide attempt, there’s a very good chance that they will not die by suicide at all, even many years later.

Research by Alex Gertner and colleagues suggests that reducing economic insecurity by increasing the minimum wage could reduce suicide. In their study, which tracked suicide rates and state minimum wage levels from 2006 to 2016, U.S. states with higher minimum wages had lower suicide rates overall. On top of this, whenever a state’s minimum wage increased, the state’s suicide rate slowed in the following year by approximately 1% to 2% for each $1 per hour increase. 

Mental health treatment can help individuals create meaningful and satisfying lives, but it’s not the only way to achieve this outcome; our environments also have an incredibly profound effect on our well-being. Indeed, the environment probably plays a much bigger role than we assume.

Positive emotional states, which can be “transferred” from one person to another within social groups, probably work in a similar way: They help us to self-correct when we start to drift off course, but even if we are not experiencing positive emotions ourselves, we nonetheless benefit from regularly interacting with others who do.