Imagine having a preventable illness that kills 700.000 people a year globally, many of them before the age of thirty. That is the case for suicide. There are many known risk factors that play a role in an individual’s choice to take their own life, including neurobiological, behavioural and social factors that place people at risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviours.

Similar factors are known to play a role in violence aimed at others, and approximately 400.000 people lose their lives in a homicide annually. However, whilst both suicide and homicide take up a large proportion of the global burden of death, they are each studied in their own realm: suicide and suicidal behaviour are regarded as a preventable public health problem, whilst homicide and other types of interpersonal violence are considered a type of crime, and hence primarily studied from a criminal justice perspective.

This rigid distinction between suicide and homicide is problematic as it hinders us from better understanding these phenomena and ultimately, designing adequate prevention strategies. It is time to remove the artificial divide, and view homicide as a public health problem: that is to say, as a problem that can be related to other harmful behaviours, that include not only suicide, but also alcoholism, drug abuse, and other risk-taking behaviors.

The idea of homicide and suicide being related is not new at all and can be traced back all the way to Augustinian thought, in which suicide was regarded as self-murder and hence was prohibited by the church. The similarities between the two behaviours continued to be recognised until the nineteenth century, when suicide was understood as a direct response to larger societal issues of the time. We argue that we should revisit this idea, which opens the possibility for a new body of research showing that similar risk factors, such as harm produced by concentrated disadvantage, produce phenomena that at first seem rather different, yet upon closer inspection share more commonalities than expected. Increasing awareness that a range of adverse social and health phenomena are driven by a few common causes can be an important first step to change ways in which we approach, and ultimately, seek to prevent violence.

Bridging the conceptual gap between homicidal and suicidal behaviours further opens the door for new work looking at the co-occurrence of aggression: aggression aimed at others, and aggression aimed at the self. These studies, too, emphasise that these behaviours are not as distinct as we first thought.

In addition, regarding homicide and other types of violence not only as crimes, but as public health problems, may allow us to make theoretical advancements in an otherwise theory-lean field. Recent steps in theoretical approaches to suicide, and our ability to use cutting edge statistical techniques to investigate these models hold great promise for future avenues – broadening such insights from self-directed violence to other-directed violence may allow for interdisciplinary theory-building that move beyond common criminal justice and criminological theories alone.

Finally, viewing both harmful behaviours as potentially stemming from similar underlying causes paves the way for public health prevention measures for both. Rather than criminal justice interventions alone, violence reduction could be increased by applying these public health intervention strategies, that include diminishing exposure to risk, controlling the use of hazardous products – think of firearms – and design programs to prevent renewed exposure to violence. Let’s move away from simply regarding violence as yet another form of crime and treat it as a public health problem.