In Finland, Fewer Suicides in Areas with Diversified Outpatient Mental Health Services

In recent decades, most developed countries have reorganized mental health services to provide more community-based programs and fewer psychiatric hospital–based interventions. But the effect of this change on population outcomes has not been well studied.

In Finland, where mental health care has been deinstitutionalized and decentralized, community-based mental health services vary widely among the country’s 428 municipalities (counties). Researchers developed a standardized system, based on survey responses and other data, to describe mental health services in 308 municipalities; they then correlated these data with overall suicide rates in each municipality between 2000 and 2004.

Suicide risk was lower in municipalities where the outpatien…