ABSTRACT
Suicide prevention is one of the major goals today of the Public Health Service of the U.S. government; indeed, this has been the case since the 1960s when the National Institute of Mental Health established a center for the study and prevention of suicide. However, as noted a few years ago in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial (Hudgens, 1983), the accumulation of knowledge about suicidal behavior in the last quarter of a century has failed to bring about a reduction of suicide in America.
