Suicide and youth violence prevention: The promise of an integrated approach

Tragic events across the United States in recent years have highlighted the important relationship between suicidal impulses and violent attacks on others. Research suggests that suicide and interpersonal violence share a number of important risk and protective factors across multiple domains of influence. These include problem-solving and coping skills, characteristics of school and community environments such as bullying, intolerance, and prejudice. Taken together, this evidence suggests that prevention approaches can integrate suicide and violence prevention by focusing on shared influences, in particular, strategies that promote good general coping skills and family functioning have potential to increase both the effectiveness and efficiency of prevention efforts. While several programs have demonstrated evidence of reductions in suicidality or in youth interpersonal violence, there have been few attempts to achieve the benefits that could come from an integrated violence prevention approach. A major obstacle is that program outcomes tend to be narrowly defined and discipline-specific, hindering the development of productive partnerships across problem areas. We argue that such partnerships are needed to bridge the gap between suicide and violence prevention. Increasing collaboration across fields can help facilitate future research and program development in concrete ways by beginning to evaluate whether current programs can simultaneously decrease both self- and other-directed violence. Programs meeting such a standard should be widely disseminated and implemented.