Who suffers from suicidality and why? Surging rates and emerging data drive experts toward new treatments and prevention strategies.
Just speaking the word suicide — or reading this story headline — might make your stomach drop. There’s no gentle way to broach the subject. But the sheer number of people who are taking their own lives demands a closer look.
The WHO describes a prior suicide attempt as “by far the strongest risk factor” for an individual. Yet more than half of the suicide fatalities in the U.S. result from first-time attempts, according to multiple studies. This can leave many victims off the radar for support. In part, people are falling through the cracks of a fragmented health care system, according to Zero Suicide. Goldstein Grumet says a lack of standardized understanding and training, starting with graduate programs, ripples into the wide range of support options and care received. “It’s a little bit of the Wild West,” she says.
While dynamic treatments and therapies have advanced in recent years — including magnetic stimulation and ketamine — many of them are centered on mental conditions like anxiety or depression. It’s now clear this scope runs too narrow, according to Goldstein Grumet and experts who are evaluating the likely contributors and circumstances preceding a suicidal crisis.
“If you step back and think about it, would you ever rely on a patient with schizophrenia to diagnose themselves with schizophrenia? … [Or] a patient with bipolar disorder to diagnose themselves as bipolar?” Galynker asks. “And both of these conditions are less lethal than pre-suicidal mental state.”
The intricate relationship between race and suicide gained some exposure in U.S. media last year, after reports revealed that the overall U.S. suicide rate in 2020 actually dropped 3 percent — a surprise to many, given the stressors of a national pandemic. That’s one reason why Galynker’s team aims to establish a suicide-specific diagnosis in medicine, similar to depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. This would legitimize the pre-suicidal mental state as its own condition, rather than an outcome of another mental illness. “Our approach is defining the symptoms, so you can find the treatment,” Galynker says. “It is a critical change.”
For starters, the majority of U.S. suicide victims have no known mental health condition when they carry out the act, according to CDC research conducted in 2016. While interpretations of that statistic vary, it might suggest that the contributing factors in suicide are not always psychological. The data could also point to shortcomings in care and screenings for people in distress.
Campbell Neurosciences, which launched two years ago, is zeroing in on a particular protein in the blood that may be associated with brain inflammation and suicidality. The company is currently recruiting participants for a clinical trial. “If there’s a biological reason for it, then we
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