World Suicide Prevention Day | Most common cause of death in young people

Barriers are to be erected at “hotspots”. Photo: dpa/Bastian Benrath Over a period of four and a half decades, fewer and fewer people in Germany took their own lives each year. From 1981 to 2019, the total number of annual suicides more than halved. But it has been rising again since then. In the year of the "turning point" of 2022, this increase was the strongest at 9.8 percent: from 9,215 "cases" in the previous year to 10,119. Since then, there have been consistently more than 10,000 people who end their lives by suicide in this country. The number of suicide attempts is many times higher.

At the beginning of the week, experts and survivors from self-help groups discussed how people at risk could be reached better and earlier and how offers of help could be designed in the rooms of the Kaiserin Friedrich Foundation for Continuing Medical Education in Berlin - also with a view to World Suicide Prevention Day, which is celebrated every year with ecumenical memorial services, panel discussions and information stands on September 10th.

This year it is often under the motto of the campaign "Your story is not over", with which a working group of the National Suicide Prevention Program (Naspro) wants to address different age and target groups in a "cross-media" way. Suicide is the most common cause of death for young people between the ages of ten and 25 - but older people who take their own lives are in the majority overall.

There were 10,372 completed suicides in 2024 - mental health experts and those affected who have or have had suicidal thoughts do not want to speak of "suicide" because it brings despair close to crime - there were 10,372 completed suicides in 2024. The fact that no figures are yet available for 2025 because the cause of death statistics only appear in the second half of the following year was just one of many points of criticism at the two-day conference "Effectively anchoring suicide prevention - educate, qualify, increase reach, promote dialogue." It was organized by Naspro, which was founded as a specialist network in 2001 in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Health under Ulla Schmidt (SPD) and WHO Europe, and the German Academy for Suicide Prevention.

In addition to the accessibility of those affected with suicidal thoughts and ethical tensions in connection with assisted suicide, the topic was also the current draft law from the Federal Ministry of Health "to strengthen national suicide prevention". Some professional associations had given critical statements on this - although they have no objection to the majority of the measures, they are calling for significant improvements. The German Medical Association called the draft “unspecific and non-binding” and called for reliable financing.

This includes, for example, the creation of a nationwide crisis service number and making it more difficult to access potentially lethal means and methods - for example through barriers at "hotspots" such as bridges or smaller pack sizes for certain medications. In addition, a specialist unit for suicide prevention is to be set up in the Ministry of Health.

Naspro head Reinhard Lindner welcomed the planned law as an important step. However, he doubts whether the current draft will meet the requirements of practice. Effective suicide prevention not only requires specialist medical structures, but also a resilient social infrastructure, emphasized the neurology and psychiatry specialist.

We got down to business with a panel discussion. Winfried Hardinghaus from the German Ethics Council warned of a “normalization trend” with regard to assisted suicide as a “disposal option”; He misses a “whole-of-society strategy” against it. The managing director of the German Academy for Suicide Prevention, Georg Fiedler, referred to the “idea of ​​solidarity, which is perhaps not as popular today.”

A participant in the audience, who lost her best friend to suicide six years ago, emphasized that it wasn't just acutely suicidal people who needed help. She herself is “one of the hundreds of thousands of survivors of suicide” and has learned how difficult it is to get help if you are unable to work after such a trauma. "We live in a welfare state," she said - but it's always about costs. This social climate is one of the reasons why the Ethics Council refuses to allow doctors to "proactively" approach seriously ill patients about a possible wish to die that has not yet been expressed. However, this is currently legally possible and is also discussed as a possibility, for example, in a guide from the Cologne University Hospital on “Dealing with Death Wishes”.

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