If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”
Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But that doesn’t make it normal.
Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind — a mental illness.
That’s led prevention efforts to typically focus on connecting people with treatment in moments of crisis.
But that’s changing. There’s a growing movement asking a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person?
During the covid pandemic, rates of anxiety and depression spiked — not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. People were out of work, isolated, struggling to make ends meet.
That led many people in the mental health advocacy world to call for a broader approach. Treatments and crisis care are vital, they say, but the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live.
Decades of research supports this idea. Interventions that improve people’s lives and prospects, such as running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends, can reduce suicide.
I spoke with Chris Pawelski, a fourth-generation farmer in Orange County, New York, for this story. He told me how his dad’s passing, caring for his mom with dementia, and the struggling finances of his family’s onion farm brought him to consider suicide.
“It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”
What helped him through that time was not just family support and therapy. It was also an economic plan. He worked with an organization called NY FarmNet, which provided a free financial consultant who helped Pawelski transition from farming onions for wholesale to a new model, growing varied produce to sell directly to consumers.
Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. He advocates for programs to help others in similar situations.
That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help people address underlying hardships before a crisis strikes.
“We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.”
Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s a tragic and entrenched problem. A new approach to prevention shifts the focus from stopping harm in moments of crisis to upstream policies that give people reasons to live.