This book focuses on one aspect of youth suicide prevention – the role of cognitive mediators in the suicide process in young people. We have written it because the topics we investigated may contribute to practical interventions to prevent suicide in young people.

Most current suicide prevention programs are educational in nature. They try to give young people knowledge about where to go for services and how to recognize symptoms in themselves and their peers. This is a reasonable approach, since one of the barriers to young people's accessing adequate care, and one of the causes of delays in treatment, is the lack of this information (Sawyer, Kosky, & Graetz, 2000).

However, even with this knowledge, it is not clear whether a young person who is seriously suicidal and in a crisis can utilize it to avoid the adverse outcome. To do so requires appropriate cognitive skills, the ability to work out what is important and what is not, and the capacity to apply the knowledge to solve the looming problems. We have focused on this point in the suicidal process. We have tried to assess whether there are cognitive skills that are deficient in suicidal young people and, if so, whether any clear implications for clinical programs in suicide prevention flow from this.

For a previous work, one of us sat in on juvenile court hearings to listen to the stories of the young people who faced the courts (Sofronoff, 1999).