ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some theoretical issues, overviews the types of school-based suicide prevention programs, and reviews the evidence for their effectiveness. It examines the evidence with regard to school-based prevention programs. The chapter then deals with the inevitable complexity of the issues, and specific suggestions made regarding future school-based efforts. The theoretical basis for suicide-related interventions is not strong, with more complex theories needed. Developmental theories that incorporate a range of risk and protective factors offer this complexity. While schools have been identified as suitable places for addressing youth suicide prevention, there are considerable challenges in designing, implementing and evaluating programs. Helpful approaches that acknowledge the complexity of both suicidality and preventative efforts include cumulative risk and resilience models, a public health approach, ecological theories and the notion of wicked problems. Interventions to reduce risk and/or increase resilience feed dynamically into the system to return the suicide risk to the threshold.
