Means Restriction

Means Matter when it comes to suicide prevention

In an effort to prevent suicide, YSPP staff and other suicide experts have focused our attention for the past two decades on identifying the risk factors, warning signs and reasons why a person attempts suicide. We’ve believed that if we understood the conditions that lead to despair and hopelessness and suicidal behavior we could prevent these unnecessary deaths. But we now know that we must also focus on how they attempt suicide.

Given that the majority of youth suicides are completed with a firearm and that there are an increasing number of lethal overdoses with prescription pain killers, it is imperative that we reduce access to these lethal means.

Click on the link below to read a poem authored by Kristen Spexarth whose son, Colby, died by suicide with a firearm at age 22.

Parking Lot Conjuring with permission of Kristen Spexarth

"Too many kids
are crying with bullets
instead of tears"

Consider these facts:

• Firearms are the #1 way in which young people die by suicide.
  
  
• The vast majority of youth (under age 18) who die by firearm suicide used a family member’s gun.
  
  
• While the numbers are considerably lower, suicide attempts with prescription opiate-related overdoses are on the rise.

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Survey of Social Workers

An article in the latest edition of Suicide & Life Threatening Behavior entitled, Suicide & Firearm Means Restriction: Can Training Make a Difference, reports on the findings of a survey of nearly 700 licensed social workers in the State of Ohio. The authors conclude that training mental health professionals in firearm assessment and safety counseling is an important aspect in addressing the reduction of suicide by firearms.

"The time is ripe for social workers to become vested in firearms means restriction as a way to prevent suicide and training is an easy and viable method to acculturate the profession."