Suicide, With No Warning

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
The New York Times - Sunday Review
Originally published March 8, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

But more than 60 percent of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, like Mr. Lewiecki’s. Reducing that statistic will most likely take different interventions than are currently proposed — like waiting periods and safe storage requirements — and those are not even on the table.

While background checks might turn up people with severe mental illness who have been prone to violence, gun suicides are often committed by people whose history doesn’t suggest a serious problem. In studies, a quarter to a third of those who killed themselves were not in contact with a psychiatrist at the time of death, and the majority were not on psychiatric medicines. “The first time the family may know of the distress is when they kill themselves,” said Dr. David Gunnell, a suicide epidemiologist at the University of Bristol in England. There may be no red flags and little forethought. To carry out a campus killing rampage, perpetrators collect weapons, identify victims and select locations. In contrast, suicides are often solitary, impulsive acts, experts say.

That is why a cornerstone of suicide prevention is simple: “restricting access to common and particularly lethal means for everyone — we know that’s effective,” said Dan Reidenberg, executive director of SAVE (Suicide Awareness and Voices of Education), a national suicide prevention group.

That means different things in different places. In Britain, suicide prevention efforts in the late 1990s involved banning the sales of large bottles of paracetamol (known as Tylenol in the United States), which had been used in tens of thousands of suicide attempts each year. When I was reporting from China a decade ago, rural officials responded to an epidemic of suicide among women by restricting pesticide sales.

In the United States, we build barriers on bridges, but have fewer barriers to the quick access to guns: “In the U.S. one of the most straightforward things to do to prevent suicide is to make firearms less accessible,” Dr. Gunnell said. The Lewiecki family believes that Kerry might well be alive if there had been a waiting period before purchase in Oregon. Studies suggest that far fewer American teenagers would commit suicide if gun owners were required to use trigger locks. Seventy-five percent of the guns used in youth suicides and unintentional injuries were accessible in the home or the home of a friend.

The entire story is here.