Suicide & Suicide Prevention

The National Guidelines for Behavioral Health Crisis Care from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) call for a sustainable infrastructure to respond to behavioral health crises, through crisis services that are accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The U.S. behavioral health (BH) workforce faces significant shortages and distribution disparities, hindering access to quality care and worsening health outcomes. A comprehensive, centralized database of BH providers is vital for advancing patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), comparative effectiveness research (CER), and evidence-based policymaking.

The first brief below provides insight into children’s and adolescents’ mental health service use in Medicaid and CHIP during the pandemic, by using a national Medicaid claims database.

The recent designation of the three-digit “988” dialing code is intended to improve public awareness of an immediate means to behavioral health crisis services, resulting in both a diversion of behavioral health calls from 911 as well as increased utilization of call services among people in crisis who are not currently getting help.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has recently developed guidelines for establishing a comprehensive crisis response system for behavioral health. Per these guidelines, a comprehensive system should provide individuals in crisis with “someone to call,” “someone to respond,” and “a place to go” to receive crisis response services.

People with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders (SUDs) benefit from integrated treatment to address both disorders concurrently. For several decades, policymakers and behavioral health systems have worked to overcome the historical separation between mental health and SUD treatment to improve care for people with co-occurring disorders.

Insufficient access to behavioral health (BH) care and the inability to get timely care are significant problems in the United States. Concerns about BH network adequacy have been prompted by evidence of narrow networks for BH, variation in network adequacy across plans, and evidence that network adequacy impacts access to certain specialties.

This report presents findings of an environmental scan and semi-structured interviews with key contributors, including governmental and non-governmental contributors, such as researchers, clinicians, advocates, service provider/payers, and policy experts. The findings included in this report are organized by specific domains and themes found within the peer-reviewed and grey literature.

Despite the increasing evidence of high suicide rates and associated risk factors for older adults in the United States, the number of programs addressing these risk factors remains limited.

Zero Suicide is a system-wide approach for health systems to improve the quality and safety of care for those at risk of suicide, with the underlying goal of preventing all suicide deaths among patients. Although evidence has indicated that Zero Suicide is effective in reducing suicide-related outcomes, little is known about how organizations fund and sustain the Zero Suicide initiative.