Paul Nestadt is about as steeped in suicide prevention as a person can be.<\/p>\n
He treats suicidal patients as a psychiatrist, has co-authored scores of research papers on how and why people kill themselves, and teaches graduate courses on the subject.<\/p>\n
But he\u2019ll be the first to admit: \u201cI can\u2019t tell you which of my patients is likely to die by suicide in the next six months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Almost nobody can.<\/p>\n
Research shows<\/a> predictions of who will be suicidal are only slightly better than a coin toss. And they haven\u2019t improved over 50 years.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t make Nestadt hopeless. Instead, it pushes him to pursue interventions that don\u2019t require pinpointing people at risk.<\/p>\n Chief among them: making it harder for people to carry out the act of killing themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of asking every doctor to figure out which patient will die by suicide and locking that patient up, it might be that we need to make sure there aren\u2019t loaded guns available,\u201d Nestadt said.<\/p>\n In an ongoing series<\/a>, KFF Health News is examining approaches to suicide prevention that expand beyond providing people at risk with medication and therapy. Although those are lifesaving measures, many clinicians, researchers, and people who have lost loved ones to suicide agree that more is needed. The challenge is that when it comes to firearms, broad policy approaches quickly become constitutionally complicated and politically polarizing.<\/p>\n Research shows that limiting access to lethal means is one of the most promising approaches<\/a> to save lives. It can involve erecting barriers<\/a> on buildings and bridges<\/a> to prevent people from jumping, as well as decreasing the number of pills<\/a> someone can buy or be prescribed at once.<\/p>\n