Suicide is an epidemic in the U.S. It’s time to look at all possible solutions.

September 5-11 is National Suicide Prevention Week. How bad is the suicide problem? Does it deserve its own week? And what is the best approach to preventing suicide?

According to the CDC, suicide is the #2 leading cause of death in Americans ages 10 to 34, and the #1 cause of death in 13-year-olds. An American is two and a half times more likely to die by suicide than homicide. Someone attempts suicide every 11 seconds, and one suicide is completed every 12 minutes. Our current suicide rate has reached the all-time high experienced during the aptly named Great Depression: 14.5/100,000 people/year.

Grim as these statistics are, the real problem is far greater than an initial look at the data would indicate. Why? Because of a coverup effected by my former profession. For years, I practiced medicine and was the director of an emergency department. Let me explain how modern medicine covers up the true amount of despair in our society.

In the coming year, 10 million Americans will wrestle with whether or not to kill themselves. 1.5 million of them will end up being treated in emergency departments. If these patients lived in the 1930’s, a majority of them would die—whereas today, most are saved. Why? Because it is much harder to kill oneself in 2021 than it was in the 1930’s—thank God.

Currently, 20% of those who attempt suicide by jumping and firearms can be saved if they arrive at a hospital in trauma’s “golden hour.” One modern ambulance carries more lifesaving capacity than an entire hospital in 1930. Today we can reverse the effects of narcotics, benzodiazepines, and other poisons, and we have ventilators to breathe for overdose patients if they lose their respiratory drive. In short, if it were not for the invention and intervention of modern medicine, today’s suicide rate would be 100 to 200 times higher than in 1930.

There is another factor to consider when contemplating our despair: one in eight adults currently takes an antidepressant to get through the day. Not so in 1930; antidepressants didn’t exist.

What should we do to prevent more suicides? For the past several decades, mental health experts have recommended that we provide greater access to mental health care, public health education, and screening for depression, and for previously marginalized groups and behaviors to be destigmatized. Yet despite implementing these recommendations for the past two decades, America’s suicide rate has grown by approximately 2% per annum.

When I attended medical school decades ago, we were taught about the protective role of faith in suicide. Since 1897 when the French sociologist Emile Durkheim quantified this effect, the protective role of faith in suicide has been confirmed time and again. A recent study in the British Journal of Psychiatry concluded “individuals who frequently attended religious services were 67% less likely to die by suicide than those who were not frequent attenders.” Likewise, a 2016 JAMA study of nearly 90,000 women found “attendance at religious services once per week or more was associated with an approximately 5-fold lower rate of suicide.”

Nonetheless, the current 62-page guidebook on managing depression and suicide by the CDC makes no mention of this well documented protective role of faith. Humans are no longer viewed as being composed of minds, bodies, and souls. Instead, we are merely animals with quicker minds.

But here is the problem of addressing suicide solely through the physical/animal model: no other animal on the planet commits suicide. No zebra ever woke up and said, “To heck with it. Today I will not run from the lion.”

Society can continue to try and prevent suicide by doing more of what is not working. But I believe it is time to consider putting words like faith, God, and love back into our toolbox when it comes to preventing suicide.

Matthew Sleeth, MD, is the executive director of Blessed Earth and author of “Hope Always: How to Be a Force for Life in a Culture of Suicide.” He will be guest preaching on the subject of Hope Always on Sept. 12 at Centenary United Methodist Church at the 9:30 and 11:15 am services.