Information about mental health and suicide prevention can sometimes include language you might not be familiar with. These are a few terms are used commonly when talking about suicide prevention.
-
Comprehensive suicide prevention plans: Plans that use a multi-faceted approach to addressing the problem. For example, including interventions targeting biopsychosocial, social, and environmental factors.
-
Crisis center: A facility or call center where people going through personal crises can obtain help or advice, either in person or over the phone.
-
Crisis counseling: Brief counseling focused on minimizing stress, providing emotional support and improving immediate coping strategies. Like psychotherapy, crisis counseling involves assessment, planning and treatment, but the scope of service is much more specific.
-
Imminent risk: A situation where a person’s current risk status is believed to indicate actions that could lead to his or her suicide.
-
Intervention: A strategy or approach that is intended to prevent an outcome or to alter the course of an existing condition (such as providing lithium for bipolar disorder or strengthening social support in a community).
-
Means: The instrument or object whereby a self-destructive act is carried out (i.e., firearm, poison, medication).
-
Means restriction: Techniques, policies, and procedures designed to reduce access or availability to means and methods of deliberate self-harm.
-
Methods: Actions or techniques which result in an individual inflicting self-harm (i.e., asphyxiation, overdose, jumping).
-
Postvention: A strategy or approach that is implemented after a crisis or traumatic event has occurred.
-
Prevention: A strategy or approach that reduces the likelihood of risk of onset or delays the onset of adverse health problems or reduces the harm resulting from conditions or behaviors.
-
Risk assessment: The process of quantifying the probability of an individual harming himself or others.
-
Risk factors: Those factors that make it more likely that individuals will develop a disorder; risk factors may encompass biological, psychological or social factors in the individual, family and environment.
-
Screening: Administration of an assessment tool to identify persons in need of more in-depth evaluation or treatment.
-
Self-harm: The various methods by which individuals injure themselves, such as self-cutting, self-battering, taking overdoses or exhibiting deliberate recklessness.
-
Stigma: An object, idea, or label associated with disgrace or reproach.
-
Suicidal behavior: A spectrum of activities related to thoughts and behaviors that include suicidal thinking, suicide attempts, and completed suicide.
-
Suicidality: A term that encompasses suicidal thoughts, ideation, plans, suicide attempts, and completed suicide.
-
Suicide survivors: Family members, significant others, or acquaintances who have experienced the loss of a loved one due to suicide. Sometimes this term is also used to mean suicide attempt survivors.
Find more terms at Mental Health & Suicide Prevention Glossary.
988: National Crisis hotline. You can call or text if you or someone you know is in crisis. Knowing these three numbers might just help save a life.