Reducing Firearm Deaths Requires Greater Attention to Suicide Prevention

Mental health advocates must work to ensure that suicide is front and center of conversations about gun violence, Jeffrey Swanson, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at Duke University, wrote in acommentary inPsychiatric Services. Swanson is an expert in the epidemiology of gun violence.“The national conversation about gun violence tends to focus on senseless rampages by troubled young men while public officials pay lip service to an oversimplified, gun-ignoring solution: ‘fix mental health’,” Swanson noted. However, “suicide is a public health problem that is twice the s ize of the homicide problem—13.4 versus 6.1 deaths per 100,000 people in 2016, and the number of suicide decedents dwarfs the number of mass shooting victims.”Swanson noted that the suicide crisis “sits squarely at the intersection of inadequate (or poorly implemented) gun laws and a failing mental health care system.” Mental illness is most often the reason that people try to end their own lives, and access to a firearm used to die by suicide is most often the reason they do not survive, he wrote. “Although there is lingering social stigma and moral approbation associated with suicide, there is also a growing public understanding that most suicides (unlike most homicides) result from a serious mental illness for which the person bears no blame.”Swanson pointed to the enactment of risk-based, time-limited gun removal laws as a good example of an intervention that would reduce gun violence...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: firearms gun removal laws gun violence Jeffrey Swanson mass shootings suicide Source Type: research