Progress in Postvention A Call to a Focused Future to Support Those Exposed to Suicide

In the late 1960s, Edwin Shneidman first focused attention on the needs of those bereaved by suicide and coined the term postvention. To quote him directly from the original 1972 source:

We hear a great deal about suicide prevention and interventions. A benign community ought routinely to provide postventive mental health care for the survivor-victims of suicidal deaths. Postvention is prevention for the next decade and for the next generation. Of the three possible (temporal) approaches to mental health crises – prevention, intervention and postvention – in the case of suicide at least, postvention probably represents the largest problem and thus presents the greatest area for potential aid. If there are about 50,000 committed [sic] suicides in the United States every year – not counting the couple million "subintentioned" presently labelled natural, accidental, and homicidal deaths – then there are at least 200,000 survivor-victims created each year whose lives are ever after benighted by that event. (p. x)