AFSP's Role in Prevention
AFSP plays an active role in seeking to reduce suicide rates through initiating and participating in projects to develop, implement and evaluate innovative approaches to suicide prevention. In its suicide prevention projects, AFSP is working in partnership with many other individuals, organizations and institutions throughout the United States and abroad, who share our dedication to finding new and better ways to prevent suicide. A key goal of each project is to disseminate information about what has been learned, through articles that reach both professional and lay audiences.
Current and recent projects include:
- The Interactive Screening Program, which has developed and pilot-tested an interactive, web-based method of reaching out to students at risk of suicide, and encouraging them to get help.
- The Physician Depression and Suicide Prevention Project, which works with a range of other groups and professional organizations to address the disproportionately high rates of suicide among physicians and physicians in training.
- The International Project on National Suicide Prevention Strategies, which is bringing together experts from around the world to examine and evaluate individual countries' strategies for suicide prevention, and to encourage replication of evidence-based projects and approaches.
- The Media Project, which encourages responsible reporting of suicide by news media.
- The Hungarian Suicide Prevention Project, which has provided training about identifying and treating patient depression to physicians and other clinicians in a region of Hungary with an extremely high suicide rate.
- The Suicide Data Bank, which has collaborated with therapists who lost a patient to suicide, to improve recognition of suicide risk and treatment of seriously suicidal individuals.
- The LGBT Depression and Suicide Prevention Project, an initiative aimed at reducing suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations.
- The Billboard Campaign looks to educate Americans about the serious nature of depression, and to urge those clinically depressed to see their doctor.
AFSP is deeply grateful for the generosity of the many individual and corporate donors whose contributions have made this prevention work possible. AFSP looks forward to these continued partnerships in the quest to better understand how suicidal behavior can be prevented, and to further such understanding among our professional and public constituencies. Donors are acknowledged in each section.
