The suicide rate now is roughly where it was in 1965 despite 20 years of sticking Americans on anti-depressants

Furious season has a quick summary of a long article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine on Suicide. One tidbit of note:

I also admire his pointing out that the suicide rate now is roughly where it was in 1965 despite 20 years of sticking Americans on anti-depressants and the like, and that once some would-be jumpers are stopped, they never again try to kill themselves.

.Here's the quote from the NY times:

Then there is the most disheartening aspect of the riddle. The National Institute of Mental Health says that 90 percent of all suicide “completers” display some form of diagnosable mental disorder. But if so, why have advances in the treatment of mental illness had so little effect? In the past 40 years, whole new generations of antidepressant drugs have been developed; crisis hotline centers have been established in most every American city; and yet today the nation’s suicide rate (11 victims per 100,000 inhabitants) is almost precisely what it was in 1965.

Would it be too much to say that maybe they are not diagnosing the correct problem? That changing and rotating the tires will not fix a blown engine?