History

In 1967, the Johns Hopkins Medical School received the National Institute of Mental Health’s first major grant specifically to establish a formal two-year Fellowship Program in Suicidology.  The pioneering program was created in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health) and others, designed to bring together and prepare postgraduates from diverse disciplines for leadership in treating, teaching, researching and developing policy toward preventing suicide.  At that time there were approximately 21,000 suicides per year in the United States.  By 2015 the number of suicides in the United States had more than doubled. Now, the number of suicides world-wide is around 1,000,000 annually.

Vision

• To join together researchers, clinicians, and policy scholars in sociology, psychiatry, psychology, nursing, economics, neuroscience, epigenetics, public health, public policy, forensics, education, epidemiology and other disciplines and consumers (patients and loss survivors), all invested in suicide prevention.
• To conduct research and pursue public policy that translate into evidence-based clinical practice, prevention programming, and legislative efforts to save lives.
• To train research scientists to pursue a prioritized research agenda addressing life-saving interventions and understandings of suicide; to train clinical practitioners in evidence-based interventions; to train mental health and public health scholars in efforts to advance public policy toward life-saving programs.
• To use research as a vehicle for advancing suicide prevention.