Leadership Exchange

Method Not Madness
May Be Key In
Suicide Prevention

he rate of suicide in America is 11 victims per 100,000

people, almost exactly the same as it was in 1965. In spite of the rise of antidepressant drugs, crisis hotline centers, and better treatment of mental illness, we still haven’t gotten much closer to understanding or preventing suicide. The reason may be that prevention focuses more on the study of illness than it does on the actual ways people attempt to kill themselves, according to Scott Anderson in his article, “The Urge to End It All.”

Anderson says that suicide is an overwhelmingly impulsive act. He cites a study of survivors that said only 13 percent reported thinking about committing suicide for eight hours or longer; 70 percent said they thought about it for less than an hour; and a whopping 24 percent said the idea had occurred to them less than five minutes before their attempt.

If that’s true, then suicide is highly opportunistic and Anderson suggests that reducing the opportunities would reduce the incidence, pointing to supporting research and anecdotal evidence. For example, he notes that states in which gun ownership is highest have the highest rates of suicide by guns. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes accounted for roughly half of all suicides until the 1970s when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas that contains lots of carbon monoxide to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted 30 percent, and those numbers have not changed.

Better Questions Lead to
Better Solutions

Faced with too much information and not enough time, today’s managers are pressed to make quick decisions. The downside to honing this skill, says Chuck Palus of the Center for Creative Leadership, is that people typically spend about 90 percent of their time solving a problem and only about 10 percent examining the problem and its context. “Often this means that they end up solving the wrong problem.”

People take “mental shortcuts” acting on what they expect to see, says Palus, co-author of The Leading Edge: Six Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex Challenges (Jossey-Bass, 2002). To help you see what you and your team may have overlooked, start asking some of the following different questions:

• R-mode questions, associated with the right side of the brain, promote patterns, synthesis, visual metaphors, emotions, or intuitions. For instance, what are the patterns, what is your intuition telling you, or what is interesting or unique about this problem?