Citation

Westers NJ. Clin. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 2020; 25(4): 729-733.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1359104520952134

PMID

32985244

Abstract

Twenty five years ago the 1995 World Health Report noted that suicide was the second leading cause of death for young people in most countries (second only to accidents), with rates rising more quickly than those of any other age group (World Health Organization, 1995). It was on this backdrop that the first issue of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (CCPP) was released. It included an appropriately timed paper aiming to increase treatment adherence and follow-up among adolescents presenting to the emergency room for a suicide attempt (Rotheram-Borus, Piacentini, Miller et al., 1996). To this end, the authors developed an intervention program for multidisciplinary staff in the emergency room with later publications showing promising results (Rotheram-Borus, Piacentini, Van Rossem et al., 1996; Rotheram-Borus et al., 2000). Other brief interventions offered in emergency rooms have since been developed, such as the Family Intervention for Suicide Prevention (Asarnow et al., 2009), Therapeutic Assessment (Ougrin et al., 2011), and the Safety Planning Intervention (Stanley et al., 2018).

Today, 25 years after the first issue of CCPP, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people between the ages of 15 and 19 (World Health Organization, 2019), with rates decreasing throughout the world among all age groups (Naghavi & Global Burden of Disease Self-Harm Collaborators, 2019). Public health initiatives to reduce access to common means for suicide, such as toxic pesticides, have played a significant role in decreasing suicide rates in many areas of the world (Mew et al., 2017). However, suicide remains the second leading cause of death among 10- to 19-year-olds in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018) where the number of visits to the emergency department for suicidal thoughts and attempts among children and adolescents doubled between 2007 and 2015 (Burnstein et al., 2019). Furthermore, global research on risk factors predicting suicidal behaviors has led to...

Language: en