Suicide prevention is an umbrella term for the collective efforts of mental health practitioners and related professionals to reduce the incidence of suicide through proactive preventive measures.

Various suicide prevention strategies have been used:

• Promoting mental resilience through optimism and connectedness.
• Education about suicide, including risk factors, warning signs and the availability of help.
• Increasing the proficiency of health and welfare services at responding to people in need. This includes better training for health professionals and employing crisis counseling organizations.
• Reducing domestic violence and substance abuse are long-term strategies to reduce many mental health problems.
• Reducing access to convenient means of suicide (e.g. toxic substances, handguns).
• Reducing the quantity of dosages supplied in packages of non-prescription medicines e.g. aspirin.
• Interventions targeted at high-risk groups.
• Research. (see below)