How can public awareness of mental health issues help prevent suicide?

If messages are framed and targeted strategically, raising public awareness has the potential to reduce stigma, shame, and discrimination, and to change community attitudes about mental illness and suicide prevention. Even in countries with more accessible mental health care, emphasis on an awareness that treatment works can lead to increased help seeking behaviors. In addition, public awareness can lead to understanding the need for training of primary and mental health care practitioners in suicide prevention practices.
Public awareness can be harnessed to achieve political ends. Champions along the political and social spectrum, at the national through the neighborhood levels, can give people permission to discuss mental disorders and suicide openly, without shame, guilt, or fear of embarrassment, and to seek help. That public message has potential to inspire behavioral change throughout the system, including among health care providers, neighbors, and family members of a person with a mental illness. Voluntary grassroots organizations have inspired, organized, and implemented many suicide prevention initiatives around the world. They have started help lines and other local initiatives. In China, for example, long before anyone in the government dared mention the word suicide, communities had funded and operated a national toll-free suicide prevention help line headquartered in Beijing.