Let me echo what Harold has said. I believe there is a huge degree of overlap. If you start to parse out the various elements of our soon to be released national strategy, you'll see the extent to which suicide prevention is effectively embedded in many of the initiatives.
If we look around the world at what the evidence tells us about suicide prevention. Whether it's the education of primary care physicians in the detection and treatment of depression as a common psychiatric forerunner to suicide; working with media around responsible reporting of suicide, which again is an evidence-based intervention; or training gatekeepers, who might be school teachers, co-workers, or family and friends, in the recognition of problems and encouragement of people with mental illness to seek help; these are all very much encompassed under the umbrella of the ongoing work of the Mental Health Commission.
I want to say something else about suicide prevention, which relates to thinking upstream. It ties in to your second comment. The ultimate reduction of suicide prevention—the narrowest thinking about suicide prevention—is the barrier on the bridge that prevents the person from jumping off that bridge. There actually is good evidence that putting up those barriers, whether they're on the bridges or in the subways, makes a difference. But it doesn't change one iota what brought that citizen to that point in his or her life when he or she goes to that bridge or subway.
We need to be thinking more broadly about upstream interventions. That's where talking about mental health promotion and prevention are really integral components to mental health reform, and they're integral components within the mental health strategy.
It's not simply making more services available. It's how you put into place those initiatives in mental health promotion at an early level, for children and youth. Take the issue of suicide, for instance, which is now the number two cause of death in Canada for people aged 15 to 24. If you're in that age group, the number one cause of death is a motor vehicle accident, and number two is suicide. That's an extraordinary and appalling statistic.
While it is true that men over the age of 55 are the highest risk group for suicide, they're also falling vulnerable to other illnesses that will end their lives. Young people aged 15 to 24 are generally a physically healthy group.