At a glance
The 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention provides concrete recommendations for addressing gaps in the suicide prevention field. It is accompanied by the Federal Action Plan, which includes over 200 actions across the Federal government to be taken over the next three years in support of these goals.
About the National Strategy
The 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (NSSP) is a bold new 10-year, comprehensive, whole-of-society approach to suicide prevention that provides concrete recommendations for addressing gaps in the suicide prevention field. This coordinated and comprehensive approach to suicide prevention at the national, state, tribal, local, and territorial levels relies upon critical partnerships across the public and private sectors. People with lived experience are critical to the success of this work.
The National Strategy seeks to prevent suicide risk in the first place; identify and support people with increased risk through treatment and crisis intervention; prevent reattempts; promote long-term recovery; and support survivors of suicide loss.
Strategic directions and goals
The 2024 National Strategy includes 15 goals and 87 objectives organized under four strategic directions:
Strategic Direction 1: Community-Based Suicide Prevention
- Goal 1: Establish effective, broad-based, collaborative, and sustainable suicide prevention partnerships.
- Goal 2: Support upstream comprehensive community-based suicide prevention.
- Goal 3: Reduce access to lethal means among people at risk of suicide.
- Goal 4: Conduct postvention and support people with suicide-centered lived experience.
- Goal 5: Integrate suicide prevention into the culture of the workplace and into other community settings.
- Goal 6: Build and sustain suicide prevention infrastructure at the state, tribal, local, and territorial levels.
- Goal 7: Implement research-informed suicide prevention communication activities in diverse populations using best practices from communication science.
Strategic Direction 2: Treatment and Crisis Services
- Goal 8: Implement effective suicide prevention services as a core component of health care.
- Goal 9: Improve the quality and accessibility of crisis care services across all communities.
Strategic Direction 3: Surveillance, Quality Improvement, and Research
- Goal 10: Improve the quality, timeliness, scope, usefulness, and accessibility of data needed for suicide-related surveillance, research, evaluation, and quality improvement.
- Goal 11: Promote and support research on suicide prevention.
Strategic Direction 4: Health Equity in Suicide Prevention
- Goal 12: Embed health equity into all comprehensive suicide prevention activities.
- Goal 13: Implement comprehensive suicide prevention strategies for populations disproportionately affected by suicide, with a focus on historically marginalized communities, persons with suicide-centered lived experience, and youth.
- Goal 14: Create an equitable and diverse suicide prevention workforce that is equipped and supported to address the needs of the communities they serve.
- Goal 15: Improve and expand effective suicide prevention programs for populations disproportionately impacted by suicide across the life span through improved data, research, and evaluation.
The Federal Action Plan
The National Strategy is accompanied by the first ever Federal Action Plan (Action Plan), which identifies more than 200 actions across the Federal government to be taken over the next three years in support of the NSSP's goals.
These actions include:
- Evaluating promising community-based suicide prevention strategies
- Identifying ways to address substance use/overdose and suicide risk together in the clinical setting
- Funding a mobile crisis locator for use by 988 crisis centers
- Increasing support for survivors of suicide loss and others whose lives have been impacted by suicide
These actions will be monitored and evaluated regularly to determine progress and success, and to further identify barriers to suicide prevention.
Injury Center's actions
CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is leading 25 actions in the Federal Action Plan.
Goals and objectives
Action
2.6, 3.4, 8.4, 10.4
CDC will continue to collect data and
implement activities that address shared risk and protective
factors related to suicide and substance use.
2.6, 3.4, 12.3
CDC will implement activities that can address
shared risk and protective factors for substance use and suicide with a focus
on youth
within the Drug-Free Communities (DFC) program.
2.7, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.7
CDC will work with SAMHSA and NIH to test
and evaluate promising suicide prevention strategies.
2.7, 2.8, 5.3
CDC will develop and promote a toolkit
for evaluating
upstream suicide prevention activities in Veteran serving organizations.
2.8
If additional funding is available, CDC
will expand
the Comprehensive Suicide Prevention program.
3.1, 3.2
CDC
will continue to fund programmatic and research opportunities to develop,
implement, and evaluate interventions to enhance lethal means safety in suicide
prevention efforts.
3.1, 3.2
CDC will assess prevalence of practices
related to safe storage of lethal means at the state and national levels to
inform prevention efforts.
6.2
CDC will conduct a series of community learning forums/webinars that support dissemination of resources and tools to help build comprehensive suicide prevention capacity among local, state, and tribal public health agencies.
7, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3
CDC, in collaboration with SAMHSA, will lead
the development of a Suicide Prevention Communication Playbook
focused on how to develop behavior change communication campaigns.
7.1
CDC will release a Vital Signs report on
suicide that examines disparities.
7.4
CDC and SAMHSA will collaborate
on the development and implementation of a national suicide prevention campaign,
pending.
7.6
CDC will collaborate with partners to develop
training for journalists on how to find, interpret, and use suicide data.
8.9, 2.6
CDC will support training of clinicians,
health care providers, and gatekeepers in effective intervention,
treatment, and follow-up for patients at risk of suicide and overdose.
9.2, 9.5, 9.6
CDC will increase collaboration and
coordination between 988 and other call centers to improve jurisdictional coordination.
10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4
CDC will complete a data challenge related
to understanding
risk and protective factors for suicide outcomes.
10.2, 10.3
CDC will collaborate with SAMHSA to explore sharing
and use of de-identified Suicide Prevention Lifeline and other data.
10.2
CDC will continue to improve
timeliness and understanding of intent of emergency department visits for
firearm-related injuries.
10.2
CDC will add social determinants of health
data to the NVDRS Restricted Access Dataset to enable data users to explore
suicide-related risk and protective factors.
10.2
CDC will add social determinants of health
data to
the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) Health
Equity module.
10.4
CDC will combine surveillance data on
emergency department visits associated with mental health conditions with
suicide-related outcome data to understand how trends in mental
health ED visits relate to trends in suicide-related outcomes.
10.4
CDC will support linkage of surveillance
data on suicides with data from prior emergency department visits to
elucidate common reasons for medical visits in the year prior to a suicide
11.4
CDC will continue to fund applied public
health research that can expand understanding of shared risk and
protective factors for suicide
13.3, 15.4
CDC will identify and share with the public
and suicide prevention partners and practitioners’ accomplishments
and lessons learned.
14.2, 2.6
CDC will facilitate and track health care
professionals’ education on best practices for reducing stigma associated
with suicide and overdose.
15.5, 2.3,
2.7, 13.1
CDC will support implementation of tools and
other resources available for Indigenous evaluation such as an Indigenous
Evaluation Toolkit for Suicide Prevention Programs.
Content Source:
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control