Abstract: Suicide gatekeeper training is considered to be the one of the most effective strategies of suicide prevention in western countries. The main contents of the suicide gatekeeper training include imparting the basic knowledge, identifying the signs of suicide, preliminarily assessing suicide risk and referring the individuals at high suicide risk. The suicide gatekeeper training had been showed to positively affect the knowledge, attitudes and skills of trainees by many researches, but the effect of the suicide gatekeeper training on suicide rates still needs future elucidation. There are some limitations in current studies: 1.There are few randomized controlled trials to assess the effectiveness of the suicide gatekeeper training; 2.The real effects of the suicide gatekeeper training on the deduction of suicide rates are hard to prove; 3. We have no unified assessment tool to evaluate the effectiveness of gatekeeper training and the indicators we use to evaluate its effectiveness are too simple. In the future, more researches should be done to make up for the limitation of past studies and more emphasis should be placed on the cross-cultural research of evaluating the unique effect of the suicide gatekeeper training.

Key words: suicide gatekeeper, suicide gatekeeper training, suicide, suicide prevention, cross-cultural research