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 sincethe bridge's opening in 1937: a morbid record 46 were in 2013 alone,possibly exacerbated by the global economic crisis. The barrier is in placeto prevent the end-point of suicidal behaviour (physically preventingsuicide) but how much effort is going into the examination of the externalfactors that drive such behaviour? Aleman & Denys argue that psychiatryhas failed to tackle suicide as a disease entity in its own right, insteadrelegating the act of deliberately ending one's life to a symptom orconsequence of an underlying psychiatric illness. They note that in DSM-5suicidality is only mentioned as a symptom of borderline personalitydisorder and mood disorders, despite this presenting as the most prominentpsychiatric emergency. They argue for a more experimental approach based onthe National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtml) thatemphasises the study of psychiatric phenomena with reference to theirunderlying mechanisms: in this case, processing of negative valence, contextand response selection, and mechanisms to regulate arousal.