If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”
Someone in the United States commits suicide every 11 minutes. It's that common. But that doesn't make it normal.
Humans have evolved for centuries to survive. So when people try to commit suicide, something goes wrong. Typically, it is assumed that something happened in the person's mind: a mental illness.
That has led to prevention efforts typically focusing on connecting people to treatment in times of crisis.
But that is changing. There is a growing movement that asks a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person?
During the Covid pandemic, anxiety and depression rates skyrocketed, not because everyone's brain chemistry suddenly changed, but because the world changed. People were out of work, isolated and struggling to make ends meet.
That led many in the mental health advocacy world to call for a broader approach. Treatments and crisis care are vital, they say, but the goal of suicide prevention must go beyond preventing people from dying and also giving them reasons to live.
Decades of research support this idea. Interventions that improve people's lives and prospects, such as running food banks to ensure families do not go hungry or organizing weekly book clubs for homebound older people to make friends, can reduce suicide.
For this story I spoke with Chris Pawelski, a fourth-generation farmer in Orange County, New York. He told me how the passing of his father, caring for his mother with dementia, and the financial difficulties of his family's onion farm led him to consider suicide.
“It's all the things that come crashing down on you,” he said. “It's weeks, months, years of dealing with all kinds of pressures that can't be relieved.”
What helped him during that time was not just family support and therapy. It was also an economic plan. He worked with an organization called NY FarmNet, which provided a free financial consultant who helped Pawelski transition from wholesale onion farming to a new model, growing a variety of produce to sell directly to consumers.
Today, Pawelski's business has stabilized and he and his wife are paying off their debts. Advocates for programs to help others in similar situations.
That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapies, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help people address underlying difficulties before a crisis hits.
“We need to think more broadly and longer term than a helpline,” he said. That's “a band-aid for a gunshot wound.”
Someone in the United States commits suicide every 11 minutes. It is a tragic and deep-rooted problem. A new approach to prevention shifts the focus from stopping harm in times of crisis to upstream policies that give people reasons to live.
