RESEARCH ARTICLE Employing crisis postcards

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Suicide is a global challenge and a major public health problem worldwide. Suicide accounts for almost 1 mil-lion deaths annually, and an estimated 10 million suicide attempts occur every year [1]. Approximately 32 % of all deaths due to suicide occur in the Western Pacific region [2]. This disproportionately high rate of suicide is geo-graphically constrained to 37 countries and an estimated 29 % of the world’s population. The suicide rate in this re-gion is approximately 19.3 per 100,000 individuals [3]. According to the 2011 report by the Department of Health, Executive Yuan in Taiwan, suicide was one of the ten leading causes of death in the nation between 1998 and 2010. The suicide rate was 16.8 per 100,000 individ-uals in 2010. In Kaohsiung City, Taiwan’s second largest metropolitan city, suicide has become a major public health issue, a fact that is reflected in a relatively high sui-cide rate, which reached 18.4 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2010. The repetition rate of self-harm reported in a revie