Citation

Ramchand R, Morral AR. Psychiatr. Serv. 2018; 69(12): 1196-1197.

Affiliation

The authors are with RAND Corporation, Arlington, Virginia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, American Psychiatric Association)

DOI

10.1176/appi.ps.201800171

PMID

30409099

Abstract

The national attention currently focused on reducing gun violence provides an opportunity to consider how to use this momentum to make significant headway in preventing suicide. Year after year, about two-thirds of all firearm deaths are suicides. Evidence indicates that the availability of firearms is related to suicide rates. In regions that experience changes in levels of gun availability, suicide rates change in the same direction; people who buy firearms are more likely than otherwise similar peers to die by suicide; and people who die by suicide are more likely to live in homes with firearms compared with seemingly similar people who did not die, as well as those who died from other causes (1). There is evidence and a broad consensus among experts who favor both restrictive and permissive gun policies that not all individuals who are prevented from firearm suicide will die by another method of suicide.

These findings do not prove that guns cause people to end their own lives. Nevertheless, they suggest that limiting access to firearms by those at heightened risk of suicide may help reduce the nation’s increasing suicide rate. Policies have been enacted and clinical practices recommended that have attempted to do just that. The objectives of these efforts are to prevent persons at risk of using guns for suicide from acquiring them, require or convince persons at risk of using guns for suicide to forfeit (permanently or temporarily) the ones that they own, or require that guns be stored in a manner that prevents their access by those at risk of using them for suicide. We briefly review the evidence for each of these approaches in preventing suicide ...

Language: en

Keywords

Public policy issues; Suicide and self-destructive behavior