June 27 this year was the day that funding was approved for San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge physical suicide deterrent barrier (www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org). This follows over 1400 suicides since the bridge's opening in 1937: a morbid record 46 were in 2013 alone, possibly exacerbated by the global economic crisis. The barrier is in place to prevent the end-point of suicidal behaviour (physically preventing suicide) but how much effort is going into the examination of the external factors that drive such behaviour? Aleman & Denys argue that psychiatry has failed to tackle suicide as a disease entity in its own right, instead relegating the act of deliberately ending one's life to a symptom or consequence of an underlying psychiatric illness. They note that in DSM-5 suicidality is only mentioned as a symptom of borderline personality disorder and mood disorders, despite this presenting as the most prominent psychiatric emergency. They argue for a more experimental approach based on the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtml) that emphasises the study of psychiatric phenomena with reference to their underlying mechanisms: in this case, processing of negative valence, context and response selection, and mechanisms to regulate arousal.