Promising Practices, Future Prospects and Research Agenda

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a rapid growth of independent initiatives using new technologies in suicide prevention, often unaware of each other’s activities. Their objectives are quite diverse, including to: improve screening, provide self-diagnosis, increase awareness, offer mutual support, provide guided and unguided self-help, access crisis intervention by text messaging, ensure safety planning and much more. To date, there is no central forum, exchange or repository of the various initiatives and experiences. Suicidal individuals seeking help are at the mercy of search engines that identify sites by popularity, rather than their usefulness or appropriateness. In addition, each newly developed service or application is competing for “market share”, and few of the technological innovations are freely shared with others. It would be useful for a worldwide organization to provide a portal for accessing all reliable sources of information and help, as well as to develop a platform for sharing information in order to facilitate advancement in the field.