Why Is the Trump Administration Deleting a Paper on Suicide Risk?

[Jessica_Rose]

Why Is the Trump Administration Deleting a Paper on Suicide Risk?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-is-the-trump-administration-deleting-a-paper-on-suicide-risk/ar-AA1yLyFV?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=f21fcec4dec145ecb75d1cd0e623a057&ei=134

Opinion by Danielle Ofri (10 Feb 2025)

How can we prevent our suicidal patients from killing themselves? That's an important question for a primary-care physician like me. I am often in the position of trying to assess—in 15 minutes or less—which patients need urgent treatment. The type of guidance that might help me can be found in a paper that was published in 2022 on PSNet, the Patient Safety Network, a federally funded initiative. "Few considerations are more critical," the authors wrote, "than identifying a person at risk for taking their own life."

On January 31, however, the authors of that paper received a notice that their peer-reviewed article had been struck from the PSNet website. Apparently, it violated Executive Order 14168, "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office.

In addition to being a physician, I happen to be a woman, so I was curious why women needed defending from an analysis of how health professionals might better help suicidal patients. In the paper, the authors reminded clinicians to keep in mind which patient groups are known to be at higher risk, citing peer-reviewed data: "High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ)." The acknowledgment of transgender people, however peripheral, was apparently enough to invite the ax.

[KathyLauren]

I hope people are making backups of important documents before the gestapo gets to them. 

People need to know about the Wayback Machine (archive.org), an attempt to archive most of the world-wide web.  It has been running for years, and has archived copies of most stable web pages going way back (hence the name).  If a document has been taken off its original website, there is a good chance that the Wayback Machine has a copy of it.  (When I was doing website design and maintenance, it saved my butt a few times, after "accidents"!)

Access those copies now, and print them out.  Paper is much more archival than anything on a computer.  Censorship is always evil, and must be resisted.