Suicide Is a Problem. Left-Wing Policies Disguised as “Public Health” Aren’t the Solution

Suicide is at a crisis level in the United States and around the world. According to the World Health Organization, more than 700,000 people committed suicide in 2019. In 2022, there were 49,476 self-inflicted deaths in the U.S. alone, or 14.2 per 100,000 people.

At the same time, assisted-suicide activism enjoys ever higher visibility, continually promoted in the media and popular culture as the best way to “die with dignity,” resulting in an increasing toll. Each year, well over 20,000 people around the world die by assisted suicide or euthanasia — which are generally not included in suicide statistics.

It is into this disturbing and paradoxical paradigm that The Lancet Public Health medical journal devoted an entire issue to suicide prevention. This should have been a welcome boost to saving lives. Instead, the mostly facile articles focus substantially on expanding government and promoting liberal policies as the best means of reducing suicides. Indeed, taken as a whole, the edition reflects the latest trend in medical-journal advocacy to transform political controversies — i.e., climate change, racism, and the like — into public-health crises to enable increased regulation and the imposition of left-wing public policies.

That is not to say that public health doesn’t have a significant role to play in suicide prevention. Of course it does. But the authors advocate shifting primary responsibility for suicide prevention from normal public-health activities and patient-centered clinical settings to an “all population approach” in which “all parts of government” will be “accountable” for the “social and commercial determinants of suicide risk.” In other words, everything government plans and executes would become ultimately about suicide prevention.