A Public Health, Whole-of-Government Approach to National Suicide Prevention Strategies

Many countries have national suicide prevention strategies, all of which aim to reduce suicide and many of which also address self-harm more generally (World Health Organization, 2018).In this editorial, we argue that national strategies could be strengthened through an increased focus on the social determinants associated with suicide and self-harm.We present a public health model that articulates how these social determinants might operate and how they might interact with individual-level risk factors.We then describe how these social determinants might be addressed by a whole-of-government approach involving cross-sectoral action and genuine social participation and empowerment of people with lived experience of suicide and self-harm.