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| World Suicide Prevention Day - September 10, 2009 |
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Provident is proud to participate in World Suicide Prevention Day, September 10, 2009. Begun in 2003, the purpose of World Suicide Prevention Day is to improve education about suicide, disseminate information, decrease stigmatization and, most importantly, raise awareness that suicide is preventable.
World Suicide Prevention Day 2009, "Suicide Prevention in Different Cultures" provides an opportunity to remind people that suicide is influenced by cultural, religious, legal, historical, philosophical and traditional factors and that these contexts need to be taken into account in considering suicide prevention. Suicide needs to be understood in terms of its cultural background, and, to save lives, suicide prevention programs need to be tailored to different cultural contexts.
World Suicide Prevention Day is an initiative of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (http://www.iasp.info), and is co-sponsored by the World Health Organization. The following information is from the IASP's website.
THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM
Suicide is a leading cause of death for people worldwide, and one of the three leading causes of death for young people under 25. Every year, approximately one million people die by suicide - one death every two minutes. The World Health Organization estimates that by the year 2020, this annual toll of suicide deaths will have risen to one and half million, and suicide will represent 2.4% of the global burden of disease.
Suicide deaths account for more than half of all violent deaths in the world - more than all deaths from wars and homicides combined. Every year many millions more people make serious suicide attempts which while, they do not result in death, require medical treatment and mental health care, and reflect severe personal unhappiness or illness. Millions more people - the family members and close friends of those who die by suicide – are bereaved and affected by suicide each year, with the impact of this loss often lasting for a lifetime.
Suicide exacts huge psychological and social costs, and the economic costs of suicide to society (lost productivity, health and social care costs) are estimated at many billions of dollars each year. Because almost a quarter of suicides are teenagers and young adults aged less than 25 (250 000 suicides each year), suicide is a leading cause of premature death, accounting for more than 20 million years of healthy life lost.
