Preventing Suicide in All the Wrong Ways
A guest post by the late DJ Jaffe, who was not a hip New York DJ, as I first thought, but a financial advisor who quit his job to find care for his severely mentally ill brother.
October 7, 2023 Introduction
DJ submitted this guest post that was published without modification in Quick Thoughts on March 22, 2016. I had no idea how he came up with such a provocative, well-written piece. I simply posted it as he had instructed me to do in an email.
DJ had delivered an earlier surprise when he popped up in my Twitter feed and on my Facebook page without much introduction. We began corresponding by direct message and email.
We immediately saw that we shared a skepticism about the suicide prevention industry that seemed more designed to generate jobs than to save lives. He sought my assistance in interpreting scientific literature that is rife with confirmatory bias and protected from robust critique. A mutual admiration society of authors profusely praises each other’s work and allows seriously flawed studies to get through peer review. We felt much of the peer-reviewed suicide and suicide prevention literature serves the purpose of lengthening CVs without any mea…