Suchergebnisse

The goals of the Postvention Taskforce of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) are to increase awareness of postvention and survivor issues. One of the strategies is to organize meetings. We report on the 1st International Suicide Postvention Seminar, held as a 1-day preevent at the 11th European Symposium on Suicide and Suicidal Behavior in Portoroz, Slovenia, September 2006. The seminar provided a state of the art review of the postvention field, with plenary presentations on research, psychotherapeutic care, development of national networks, and of postvention materials. We summarize the presentations below.

There is strong evidence for the existence of the Werther effect, or the phenomenon of an observer copying suicidal behavior he or she has seen modelled in the media. As a consequence, a number of countries have developed guidelines that promote responsible reporting of suicide. Using nine such guidelines as examples, this paper demonstrates that they tend to have similar content (emphasizing, for example, that suicide should not be glamorized or sensationalized and that explicit descriptions should be avoided, and stressing the importance of providing information about help services), but differ in the way in which they have been developed (e.g., the extent to which media professionals have been involved) and implemented (e.g., whether their "roll-out" has involved a considered dissemination strategy). The paper also reviews the evidence from evaluations of media guidelines, and concludes that it is too limited to determine whether the guidelines have had an impact on the behavior of media professionals or on completed and attempted suicide rates. It makes recommendations for further evaluative work, and suggests that the lessons from well-designed evaluations should be shared.

Abstract. This chapter draws on internationally available data to describe the epidemiology of suicide and self-harm in the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region. It then describes the suicide prevention activities in the region, using in-depth case studies to highlight some key suicide prevention activities in certain countries/areas and the Global Survey on Suicide Prevention conducted in 2013 by the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) and WHO. It demonstrates that there is considerable variability both between and within low and middle income countries and high income countries, both in terms of rates of suicide and self-harm and in terms of the preventive efforts that have been mobilised to address them. Adequate funding for suicide prevention efforts in the region should be a priority, as should the delivery of a range of suicide prevention approaches. Evaluation and monitoring efforts are also crucial.