Citation

Martínez-Alés G, Barrigón ML, Lopez-Castroman J, Baca-Garcia E. Front. Psychiatry 2021; 12: e676487.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Frontiers Media)

DOI

10.3389/fpsyt.2021.676487

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Suicide claims almost 1 million lives globally every year. Understanding and preventing suicidal behaviors and death by suicide is a largely unmet need: despite substantial efforts, suicide remains the second leading cause of death among youth and, over the last two decades, suicide mortality rates have increased in several regions across the globe (1). For instance, in the United States, suicide is the only leading cause of death that has not diminished over the last two decades--alongside opioid overdose, an entity that is closely related to suicide (2). The impact of suicide is far-reaching and affects families and communities over generations. Advancing suicidology is an urgent public health challenge.

Understanding suicidal behaviors is complex, as they emerge in the context of a complex multilevel chain of causation that includes poorly clarified neurobiological pathways and dynamic individual- and group-level risk and protective factors, interacting in a nuanced balance. Accordingly, despite substantial efforts, advancement of suicide risk stratification, prevention, and treatment tools over the last decades has been limited. Key limitations driving this phenomenon have been pointed out elsewhere and include, among others, (i) the fact that most research on suicide comes from a relatively small number of high-income countries, even though most people who die by suicide live in low and middle-income countries (3), (ii) traditional ethical reasons to systematically exclude suicidal individuals from clinical studies (4), or (iii) technical limitations, such as a generalized lack of enough detailed information in large prospective cohorts or a poor uptake of modern causal mediation epidemiological methods...

Language: en

Keywords

attempted suicide; suicide; data science; global mental health; mediation