Did you know?

• In the United States, one person completes suicide every 14 minutes.
• It is estimated that more than 5 million people in the United States have been directly affected by a suicide.
• Experts believe that most suicidal individuals do not want to die - rather they want to end the suffering they feel.
• Experts also know that suicidal crises tend to be brief.

Despite the staggering statistics around suicide, the latter information gives us hope and a place to intervene. Lives can be saved with early recognition of suicidal risk and early intervention. Every New Jersey community has services available for the assessment and treatment of suicidal behaviors and its causes.

 

New Jersey MentalHealthCares Helpline

Answering New Jersey Suicide Calls to the

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

24,000 suicide related calls are made by New Jersey residents every year, according to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) funded program. Until yesterday only a limited number of these calls were answered in New Jersey while most of them were routed to crisis centers in other parts of the country.

 

Starting on September 4, 2012, the Mental Health Association in New Jersey's New Jersey MentalHealthCares Helpline began to accept calls during its regular hours (weekdays, 8 am to 8 pm) to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The average answer time for a call is 15 seconds or less. Click here to read the press release. 

 

 

Best Practices for Helping Suicide Callers 

New Jersey MentalHealthCares employs The American Association of Suicidology's model for assessing suicidal callers which has been developed into the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Suicide Risk Assessment Standards. The approach focuses on four areas: desire, capability, intent and buffers. This practice spans beyond phone interventions as it is useful in other types of client contact. Click here to read more. 

 

How do you do it? 

What proactive steps do you take to help prevent suicide? Do you read current research and clinical practice information, plan agency-wide prevention awareness activities, or bring the issue to larger community awareness? Please share your strategies and experiences on the Mental Health Association in New Jersey's Facebook page. Together we can work to reduce the number of lives tragically touched by suicide.

 

Suicide Awareness Events

September 9th through September 15th is National Suicide Prevention Week. This year's theme is "Collaborations in Suicidology: Bridging the Disciplines." 

 

Click here for more information on World Suicide Prevention Day  or World Suicide Prevention week.  

The recent shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin have once again led to discussion of the correlation between mental illness and violence.

 

20 out of every 100 adults in the United States have some form of mental illness. 5 of those 20 will have a diagnosis considered "severe." These individuals rarely pose a danger. The chance of dangerousness does however increase without proper treatment.

 

According to an op-ed article on newsday.com, current research supports that the issue is not the presence of mental illness, but lack of treatment. Given this framework, serious consideration needs to be directed toward issues of stigma, educating the public on how to support individuals showing possible signs of mental illness and encouraging them to seek help, and increased accessibility to appropriate treatment.

 

Click here to read more. 

 

Lack of understanding about mental illness often exacerbates stigma, especially when symptoms are mistakenly perceived as being under a person's control. On the contrary, current research continues to indicate that mental illness is a physical disorder comparable to other physical illnesses such as diabetes and cancer. Like other physical illnesses --- mental illness is a problem that requires treatment rather than posing an issue to shun.

 

One example is indicated in a study reported in the Journal Psychological Medicine, which points to the analysis of brain scans as a useful tool in the treatment of psychotic illnesses. Click here to read the Reuters' article about the study.