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Suicide is a preventable public health problem
Suicide has been recognized as a serious public health problem in a number of reports, including the Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent Suicide (1999), the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (1999), the Institute of Medicine's Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative (2002), Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America. Final Report (2003).
In 1997, the U.S. Congress passed resolutions (S.Res.84/ H.Res.212) in both chambers recognizing suicide as a national problem and a national priority. These resolutions led to a number of suicide prevention initiatives on the part of the federal government led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Indian Health Service (IHS) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
Two national surveys, commissioned by SPAN USA and conducted by Research!America, have helped shed light on how America feels about the importance of mental health services and suicide prevention. A comparison of the results shows that a large majority of Americans believe that physical and mental health are equally important, and a similar number agree that mental health, including treatment for depression and suicide prevention, should be part of any basic health care plan. However, an increasing number of people today think that physical health is treated as more important than mental health in our current health care system. For more information, see the summary and press release covering the 2006 poll or the 2004 poll.