Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, with young people particularly affected. These are not abstract figures. Each life lost represents a story interrupted, a family altered, and a community left to navigate grief and unanswered questions. Public health requires that we confront this reality not only with data, but with a commitment to building systems that respond to human experience in real time.

From Fragmentation to Continuity Across the Lifespan

For many years, suicide prevention in the United States has been shaped by dedicated organizations working across research, advocacy, education, and crisis response. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has played a central role in advancing scientific understanding, funding critical research, and advocating for national policy changes that recognize suicide as a preventable public health issue. Its work has helped elevate awareness, influence legislation, and bring suicide prevention into mainstream health conversations.

The Jed Foundation has taken a complementary path, focusing on upstream prevention by strengthening emotional health among adolescents and young adults. Through partnerships with high schools, colleges, and universities, JED has worked to embed mental health support within the environments where young people live and learn. Its programs have helped institutions move beyond reactive approaches toward more proactive models that build resilience, identify risk earlier, and foster a sense of belonging.

Each organization has demonstrated meaningful impact over time. Each has contributed to saving lives and shaping how mental health is understood. Their efforts, however, have largely operated within distinct domains. One has advanced national research and advocacy. The other has transformed youth and campus mental health systems. Both have addressed critical points along the continuum of care, yet the broader system has remained fragmented.

The decision to merge as equals reflects a recognition that suicide prevention cannot be addressed in silos. Public health challenges of this magnitude require continuity across the lifespan. Early emotional support, community-based intervention, crisis response, and long-term recovery must function as part of an integrated system rather than a series of disconnected efforts.

Connection, Not Scale Alone, Defines Public Health Impact

Public health is often described through infrastructure and policy. Those elements are essential, yet they are insufficient on their own. Public health is ultimately about connection. It connects evidence to action, systems to individuals, and care to lived experience.

Suicide prevention sits at the intersection of these connections. Risk is influenced by social conditions, access to care, stigma, and the environments in which people interact. Protective factors such as trusted relationships, purpose, and community support can alter outcomes when they are present and accessible. The challenge has not been a lack of understanding. The challenge has been delivering that understanding in ways that are coordinated, equitable, and sustained.

A unified organization has the potential to bridge long-standing gaps. It can align research with real-world application, ensuring that scientific insights inform programs that reach people earlier. It can connect youth-focused interventions with broader public awareness efforts, creating continuity rather than gaps as individuals move through different life stages. It can also strengthen advocacy by bringing together complementary perspectives into a more cohesive national voice.

Scale introduces both opportunity and responsibility. A larger organization can mobilize resources, influence policy, and expand reach. Public trust, however, is built in local and personal interactions. The effectiveness of this merger will depend on its ability to maintain proximity to individuals and communities while expanding its national impact. Size alone does not create connection. Intentional design does.

The combined organization is expected to operate with substantial resources, which creates an opportunity to accelerate progress. Resources must translate into accessible programs, stronger partnerships with schools and health systems, and tools that enable families, educators, and clinicians to act with confidence. Public health systems succeed when they reduce friction for those seeking help and make support visible before a crisis emerges.

This moment also offers a broader lesson for the health sector. Fragmentation is not unique to suicide prevention. Across chronic disease, health equity, and digital health, organizations often operate with shared purpose but limited alignment. The willingness of these two organizations to merge reflects an understanding that structural change may be necessary to achieve meaningful outcomes.

The integration process will require thoughtful leadership and a clear sense of purpose. Combining cultures, programs, and strategies requires discipline and humility. Success will not be measured by organizational scale or visibility. It will be measured by whether fewer individuals reach a point of crisis without support and whether more people experience a system that feels connected, responsive, and human.

Suicide is often described as preventable, which places responsibility on the systems designed to address it. Prevention requires more than awareness. It requires intentional coordination, early recognition, and sustained engagement across the continuum of care.

This merger does not resolve the complexity of suicide prevention. No single organization can. It does represent a meaningful step toward greater alignment in how society responds to one of its most pressing public health challenges. Connection is not an abstract ideal in public health. It is the foundation upon which progress depends.

For more information about both organizations, visit these organizations’ websites at afsp.org and jedfoundation.org. 

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The wrath of climate change is melting glaciers, changing the course of mighty rivers, and threatening traditional ways of life worldwide. Even wildlife is affected. Along with this comes famine, a loss of occupations, and a terrible sense of helplessness where self-sufficiency existed previously.

Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250K additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress alone. The direct damage costs to health are estimated to be between US$ 2–4 billion per year by 2030.

Governments and environmental groups are desperately trying to find speedy solutions to the damage already seen and the certainty of decades devoid of so much that it is more than worrisome. Futures that seemed assured to be similar to the past for families as they planned for themselves and their children are now shrouded in uncertainty. As the adults seek legislation, where does this leave the children?

Underestimating Childhood Effects?

Children are especially vulnerable to certain weather-related events such as wildfires and the smoke and particulates spewed into the air. Systematic reviews of the literature mostly summarize adult morbidity in the setting of wildfire smoke. Those pertaining to children demonstrate an increase in respiratory infections and asthma presentations in the setting of wildfire smoke. Less is known about the health effects for children with other chronic health conditions. But aside from the detrimental physical changes in children’s health, there are the psychological ones that will affect these children’s mental health and future.

Climate change has been seen by the World Health Organization as the greatest global health challenge of the 21st century and this will be particularly true for young people in terms of both their physical and mental health. It is the mental health aspect of this challenge that has received inadequate attention. We are only now beginning to realize our lack of preparation in terms of diagnosis and treatment for climate change-related mental difficulties.

The mental health conditions that are seen as particularly vulnerable to climate change and its effects on humans include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, reduced subjective well-being as well as increased suicide rates, and hospitalizations for mental health disorders.

Children, no matter where they look, whether on TV or the Internet, or any social media platform, are faced with inescapable and negative information on climate change. They believe they have little control over it, and any power they have is limited, all of which leads to an increasing degree of anxiety, now referred to as climate anxiety, also known as climate distress.

The Mental Effects on Children

In a survey of 10,000 children and young people ages 16 to 25 on climate change in 10 countries, 59% of the respondents were rated as very or extremely worried, and 84% at least moderately worried about climate change. Over half of the respondents indicated they were sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.

Forty-five percent of the respondents indicated their feelings about climate change had a negative impact on their daily life and functioning, and others were frightened. Eighty-three percent said they thought that adults fail to take climate change seriously enough. Government actions, also related to climate change, were not viewed in a favorable light, and the subjects’ feelings displayed a sense of betrayal rather than reassurance.

Climate change, which we might normally consider to have an impact on physical health, too, has a seriously eroding effect on children’s ability to learn. It has been reported that every 1°F increase in annual ambient temperatures in classrooms has been causally linked to a 1% reduction in overall learning in school children. How much of a learning impediment will this increasing temperature account for in the next several decades unless the problem is properly addressed?

Research has also indicated that natural storms, wildfires, and earthquakes appear more frequently than previously and affect children, their families and the entire community in which they live. This displacement puts children at higher risk for developing PTSD, depression, anxiety, phobias, sleep disorders, attachment disorders, and substance abuse.

Climate change, therefore, can be seen as instrumental in creating problems in emotional regulation, cognition, learning, behavior, language development, and academic performance. The sum total of all of these disorders and diminutions of normal development weigh heavily on our young people and our children.

The situation is even graver in the developing world. Children who live in poverty will have the most dramatic, negative effects on their existence. Climate change, therefore, will continue to maintain the existence of a related underclass that may have few opportunities to advance in a technologically developed world.

Legislation may address certain future aspects of climate change, but healthcare professionals and researchers are concerned with the present-day circumstances and what type of mental health or community help is most effective for everyone, especially children.

More inter-disciplinary research is needed in this area to better understand how risk and protective factors affect young people’s likelihood of experiencing mental health and, importantly, wellbeing impacts from both direct and indirect exposures to climate change. Of particular urgency is the need for research that investigates how to promote the protective factors of young people in the face of the ongoing, cumulative and long-term impact of climate change.

The lives we’ve learned to live over the past 50 years may have meant we were borrowing from our children’s futures, and that is unacceptable. If we give them one legacy, it should be health and the possibility of a better day tomorrow.

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