It’s Hard To Predict Who Will Be Suicidal. It’s Easier To Ensure People Can’t Shoot Themselves.

Paul Nestadt is about as steeped in suicide prevention as a person can be. 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. But he’ll be the first to admit: “I can’t tell you which of my patients is likely to die by suicide in the next six months.” Almost nobody can. Research shows predictions of who will be suicidal are only slightly better than a coin toss. And they haven’t improved over 50 years. But that doesn’t make Nestadt hopeless. Instead, it pushes him to pursue interventions that don’t require pinpointing people at risk. Chief among them: making it harder for people to carry out the act of killing themselves. “Instead 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’t loaded guns available,” Nestadt said. In an ongoing series, 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...