Citation

Perlis RH. JAMA Netw. Open 2022; 5(7): e2225794.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, American Medical Association)

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.25794

PMID

35838676

Abstract

Suicide was recognized as a major public health challenge long before COVID-19 refocused attention on the particular challenges in accessing mental health care in the United States.1 The bipartisan passage of the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act2 by the US Congress in 2020, which created a national 3-digit number (988) for people in crisis, represented an important step toward acknowledging the scale of this problem, building on the success of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline launched in 2005. As of July 2022, Federal law mandates the availability of this national suicide hotline accessible by dialing 988 nationwide, an effort to ensure a single point of entry for people in crisis and to begin to bend the curve on suicide.

The willingness to confront suicidality head-on is a welcome departure from the recent past, when depression screening efforts in primary care settings sometimes avoided even asking about suicide, lest they incur medicolegal liability in settings when there were no resources to address a positive response. By comparison, it is hard to imagine screening for heart disease risk without asking about smoking...

Language: en