Our Centre?s logo represents our support of a public health approach to suicide prevention. A public heath approach is population and risk-factor oriented rather than symptom or disease oriented as in traditional approaches. Physicians typically treat signs of illness, but not the risk. But risk reduction may be essential to preventing recurrence of illness; Diagnosing and providing treatment for suicidal persons are important, but reduction of risk factors in the community at large would be even more cost effective.

In fact, there had been concerted effort to advocate the public health approach to suicide prevention. For instance, the public health approach has been endorsed by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP). Moreover, an increasing number of countries, for example, the United States, England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and Norway, are developing national strategies that combine various population-based and high-risk strategies. It shows that the public health approach to suicide prevention is replacing the traditional medical model focusing solely on emergency treatment.

Like our colleagues working on suicide prevention in different parts of the world, we also believe that suicide prevention requires strengthening the resilience and reducing the risk of the whole community. Our logo symbolizes this goal - a shift of the whole population?s risk to the left, representing a lower average risk among the whole community, as well as fewer people at high risk.

In order to achieve this goal, we very much want to extend a warm invitation to all of you in our collaborative effort in suicide prevention. Also represented in our logo, ?suicide prevention is everybody?s business?? We very much hope to join hands with everybody in the community to prevent such tragedies in our community.