New Year’s Changes

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2013 starts with a new face for Crisis. After 7 years, a newly designed cover has been chosen to accompany the journal content, and I truly hope that our international readership will like it. However, the most important change brought by the New Year is the 20% increase in the size of the journal – a move that is expected to bring the average number of articles to at least ten per issue. Considering that only 3 years ago we moved from four to six issues per year, this further change will actually mean that the size of the journal has doubled since 2010. Naturally, the extra space gained will result in more opportunities for contributors and – we hope – reduce waiting time for printed versions of articles. The advance online publication already provides an excellent service to those authors who are looking for a rapid utilization of their accepted papers. We are pleased to find that the number of submissions to Crisis has been steadily increasing, even doubling over the last few years. In 2012, we began to provide three reviews per article in order to ensure an even higher level of quality. Of course, some of the papers submitted in 2012 were rejected within a few days of submission and were not sent out for review. Although disappointing for the authors of these submissions, a quick turnaround reduces overall waiting time and permits faster resubmission elsewhere. These changes in Crisis were done in response to the much increased number of good submissions to the journal, coupled with the desire to offer adequate space to potential contributors. It is worth remembering that, in the last decade, the number of published articles in the area of suicide has increased exponentially, with more than 3,000 suicide-related articles published in 2011 alone, and a doubling of the number of articles in just 3 years (from approx. 1,500 in 2008 to more than 3,000 in 2011). Today, approximately 5% of these articles are published in the traditional journals in the area of suicide (apart from Crisis there are Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior and Archives of Suicide Research). The remaining 95% are distributed among journals of psychiatry (approximately 10% of this quota), psychology, general medicine, forensics, and sociology. While the percentage of materials published in psychiatric journals is undoubtedly indicative of the importance of this topic, there is actually evidence that contributions to suicidology from other fields such as medicine, forensics, and sociology have greatly increased as well. Personally, I consider this development very good news because only through a multifocal lens (like that provided by multidisciplinary integration) may we hope to gain a comprehensive view of suicide phenomena (De Leo, 2002). In addition to the growing interest in suicide research and prevention in fields other than psychiatry, we have also noticed a change in the background of the contributors. The increasing number of contributions by geneticists, biologists, neurophysiologists, neuroradiologists, public health experts, epidemiologists, demographers, anthropologists, historians, media experts, and economists will surely widen our cultural horizons by providing more interpretive keys. Diverse approaches help us obtain more credible and clearer views of the problems. In light of this, I have welcomed with enthusiasm the increased presence of transcultural perspectives to our published materials. Personally, I believe that the study of the commonalities and differences between countries in the expression of suicidality may further their interpretation and may result in more custom-tailored suicide prevention programs. The recent deliberation by the World Health Organization to widen the scope and the (now global) participation of the START Study will hopefully support such efforts (De Leo & Milner, 2010; De Leo, Milner, & Wang, 2009). I believe the main reason studies on suicide prevention practices have to date often had contradictory results is their (quite) simplistic nature. One area where more convincing results were obtained is access to means of suicide. Even here problems remain regarding the “migration” to different methods of suicide and taking into account “natural” trends in suicide. Disappointment with inconsistent results may lead to “heroic” reactions that, although well meant, are risky. One example is public