Pesticide Bans Cut Suicide Deaths

In many low- and middle-income countries, ingesting pesticides is a common suicide method. Studies from Sri Lanka and elsewhere show that banning the most toxic compounds and substituting less lethal ones lowers case fatality and drives large declines in overall suicide rates. This is a concrete, scalable policy lever that doesn’t require solving underlying mental illness to save lives. — It reframes suicide prevention as a tractable product-regulation problem where means restriction yields big, fast mortality gains.