Methodologies Employed in Economic Evaluation of Suicide Prevention Interventions: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Economic evaluations can be a powerful tool to assist policymakers in prioritizing interventions to reduce the number of suicides. However, the number of economic evaluations of suicide prevention is low and their quality vary. The aim of this paper is to review the literature on economic evaluations for suicide prevention, specifically focusing on the methods used to measure and value the effect of interventions. To identify articles, we searched PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus for the period from 2000 to 2023. Since the aim was to investigate how a reduction in the number of suicides is measured and valued when evaluating suicide prevention interventions, we only included studies containing effects on mortality. In total 560 unique hits were identified. Most studies were excluded after the first screening of abstracts and titles. The most common reason for exclusion was that the study did not evaluate an intervention for suicide prevention. The final analysis included 16 studies. The number of economic evaluations of suicide prevention is still low, but there is a positive trend and methodological improvements have been made. Nevertheless, several areas where more research is needed were identified, regarding both how to measure and value the effect.