Sure.
Some of the big misconceptions that I deal with regularly are the close tying and connection of suicides to mental health. There's a myth out there that all people who die by suicide, or 90%—and many advocacy organizations still have this number—have mental health issues. The way that we know this is by a method called psychological autopsies. There are some challenges with that.
Whenever we do coroner reviews, and I've been a part of those.... If we look at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, we see that mental health is a factor in about 56% of suicides, so this close linking between suicides and mental health doesn't address all of the suicide concerns we have. Some people have suicides because of issues that aren't related to their mental health: physical health, disabilities, socio-economic determinants of health and those types of things.
Another myth about suicide that I always like to battle is this idea that when we talk, ask questions or screen for suicide, we're somehow introducing risk into people. In fact, talking openly about it and having—I see the sign—the ability to interact with people on a human level about suicide actually protects. We have good research showing that people benefit from that.
If we think about major risk factors, there is a laundry list, but I would like to posit that we have our mental health, our physical health, systemic racism and exclusion, and in youth, we have discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual minorities, which is a large factor.