The rise in the number of suicides in the United States should be concerning to all citizens and residents and must require more aggressive intervention to avoid potential suicide epidemic. Previously, suicides seem to cluster among groups or individuals who are identified medically as severely depressed or who suffer from severe mental and psychological disorder from war trauma. Recent observation shows that family members and victims of mass shooting are increasingly contributing to the rising suicide rate in the United States. Regrettably, news or reports about high suicides rates among war veterans and severely depressed individual/groups no longer rings bell in the ears of a good many of American citizens and residents. With the addition of the new at-risk group for suicide, suicide rate might rise to an epidemic proportion if needed actions are not aggressively pursued. The author fears that the trigger for suicide might be lowered to other human discomforts or pain and suffering associated with normal human existence. While there are some medical and rehabilitation programs charged with the task to identify and prevent high rate of suicide among at-risk individuals/groups, the programs need to be buffered and infused with new state of the art methods/technology and adequate resources. In addition to current suicide prevention programs, the below suggested short- and long-term programs and actions could be helpful to prevent and reduce the rising suicide rates in the United States.

Short-Term Program

Emotional Support Surge (ESS) Program: New or recent traumatic life events attracts immediate public support during and immediately after the events, but the public support quickly wanes within a couple of days and the victims of the traumatic events and their family members retires quickly to painful emotional and psychological loneliness. During the period of loneliness, the victims are confronted with difficult decisions of how best to resume normal life activities and re-integrate into the society that inflicted the trauma on them, while nursing ongoing emotional and/or physical pain created by the trauma. In the author’s opinion, the window period identified as the loneliness period is one of the most vulnerable suicide risk period of victims of trauma. Intervention prior to and during this period might be helpful to prevent potential suicide thought and actions by the victims and their family members. In the light of above identified vulnerable period, a new program must be instituted to provide sustained and long-lasting emotional support surge to all victims of trauma for as long as necessary until such victims resumes normal activities and re-integrated into the community without any vestiges of potential suicide thought or actions. Achieving sustained emotional support surge to all victims of trauma would require trained suicide surge volunteers. The volunteers would be selected from community members where the victims reside. The emotional support surge would include visitations and social discussions, programs and activities that gladdens the heart and mind, economic support if needed, religious support if needed, travels, recreational activities, out pouring of love, engagements of animal social support, and many more. The current conventional suicide intervention program must continue as parallel program to the ESS program and must not be replaced or discarded. The establishment of the suicide surge volunteer program should be adopted as a non-profit volunteer organization with subsidies from the government. Individuals volunteer time must be tax-deductible to encourage the general public to enroll as members.

Long -Term Program

Non-Drug Medical Treatment: Medical science must research the possibility of replacing drug treatment of various mental/psychological conditions with non-drug physical treatment. Suicide Side effects of continuous use of some pharmaceutical drugs on the brain or the withdrawal of the use of some of the drugs after long term use must be eliminated and replaced with simple device that could similarly act on the brain to achieve the same or better results without any side effects. The author proposes to the medical community to develop a device that could selectively identify and stimulate specific locations of the brain or its neurons associated with good mood (joy, happiness, etc.) and suppress areas associated with bad mood (anxiety, depression, etc..) to prevent potential suicide thoughts and/or actions while generating long lasting pleasure, joy, and happiness. This proposal could be treated as science fiction at the moment because there has been no urgent need to embark on this project. Recent rising suicide rate should be treated as one of the medical emergencies that led to the discovery of vaccines, antibiotics, HIV drugs, and human genome project.