Preventing Youth Suicide: Doing the right thing or not?
Posted on 14/02/2012 | 2 Comments
Just had a chance to read a report put out by well meaning people on the topic of suicide prevention in youth. In that report the author kept repeating about the many community and school-based programs that have been proven to prevent youth suicide. While I wish that this was true, it is simply not the case. So I am going to write a few blogs about how we know if a program actually prevents youth suicide or not. The first issue is what does the program measure as an outcome?
If a program intends to prevent suicide it must measure suicide. No other measure can be substituted. To my knowledge, there is no data available on this key outcome variable in reports about these community and school-based programs. Instead, we read that some programs increase knowledge about suicide or even decrease the incidence of self-harm behaviors over a short period of time. These are what we call proxy measures and these do not predict changes in suicide rates. We have many examples of interventions that change proxy measures and yet have no impact on the key outcome measure. You can not determine the depth of a well by measuring the length of the pump handle!
Unfortunately, too many people use these proxy measures as “proof” of suicide prevention and go about putting these programs into place. This is a big problem. Not only do we not know if these programs decrease suicide or not, but we do not know if they do any harm! Some early research showed that well intended school interventions actually increased suicide rates! And, guess what, the decrease in suicide rates begin well before suicide prevention programs were put into place and occurred in locations where these programs never existed!
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. “It is not enough to do something. It is imperative that we do the right thing”. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Remember all these cautions?” Could be that they apply to so called suicide prevention programs also?
--Stan
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This is a great set of comments and rings very true.
I totally agree that scientists (just like everyone else) have their biases and foibles. After all, scientists are human beings too! But science is different than scientists.
The scientific method is the most objective frame that we have by which to evaluate and predict. Science is not about finding truth. It is only about being less wrong most of the time. The scientific method (experimental design and mathematics) gives us the ability to test what we believe. The scientific method is not used to prove something is correct, on the contrary, the scientific method is designed to prove that something is not correct! It is designed to test what is called the “null hypothesis”. It takes ideas that come out of left field (or wherever else they come from) and puts those ideas to an independent test.
t does not drive our beliefs. It does however challenge our beliefs. In that way it is self-correcting. Of course scientific inquiry and understanding lives within a wider social context. That is one of the great features of science.
But gravity is gravity, social context notwithstanding. And thus it is nasty, brutish and long. As Brecht said, (something like this) - the purpose of science is to save us from everlasting error.
By Christina Carew on May 11th
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What people are saying?
michelle025 said...
Don´t suicide cause life doesn´t belongs you, your life belongs to God and he is the only one that can take it away. Believe in God and you won´t even have reasons to think about suicide. God is the only way.
Comment made on March 12th, 2012
michelle025 said...
By the way, if you wanna believe in God and be saved, you just have to pray, which means talk to him and testify that you only believe in him and that you wanna be save, he´ll hear you.
Arcos Hinchables
Comment made on March 12th, 2012
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