December 25, 2014 – Depression Help

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Anchor lead: Simple interventions may reduce the toll of suicide, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Almost 40,000 people die each year in the United States alone from suicide, with many times that number making an attempt.  Michael Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says a recent study looking at national data from Sweden demonstrates the efficacy of talk therapy.

Klag: What they were able to do was to use national data to look at people who had attempted suicide and not been successful, some of whom had used these talk clinics and some didn’t.  Because these talk clinics rolled out slowly, there was a lot of similarity between these people who used the services and people who didn’t.  And the services were about six to seven sessions of talking through the issues, and what they found was that it was about 25% reduction in the first year of suicide in these people who had attempted and used therapy compared to people who had attempted and not used therapy.  :33

Klag says other studies have shown that such is strategy is very cost-effective as well.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.