Norman Louis Farberow (February 12, 1918 – September 10, 2015) was an American psychologist, and one of the founding fathers of modern suicidology. He was among the three founders in 1958 of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, which became a base of research into the causes and prevention of suicide.

He was born in 1918 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

After completing his tour of duty in World War II, Farberow enrolled in the University of California, Los Angeles. While enrolled in UCLA's doctoral program in psychology Farberow studied suicide. With few relevant references to draw upon for his 1949 dissertation, Farberow saw the potential for reawakening “interest in a long-neglected, taboo-encrusted social and personal phenomenon.” Farberow earned his doctoral degree from UCLA in 1950 while working with veterans in the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic. He helped found the suicide prevention center along with Robert E. Litman.

Farberow served as a World War II Air Force Captain. The war years were a time in the United States of relatively low suicide rates, a wartime phenomenon commonly observed when a nation's armed forces and citizens unite under feelings of common purpose and mutual goals.

In the decade after the war, suicide rates rose quickly as the sense of unity and shared purpose began to disappear. Wrenching social and personal readjustments were often needed, and these needs were further complicated by the emotional distress and mental health problems of returning veterans. Many expressed their deepening inner turmoil in unhealthy ways, through suicidal impulses and acts. Suicide's continuing taboo, embedded in cultural and religious condemnations of shame, guilt, self-blame and cowardice, magnified an underlying sense of worthlessness and hopelessness.

Farberow saw the effects of these dynamics and focused on solutions including fundamental and humanitarian changes to the way in which communities treated the suicidal. Soon his time as a psychotherapist became eclipsed by his continuing research on suicide with his colleague, Dr. Edwin Shneidman.

During the 1950s, the men worked together at the Veterans Administration (VA) in Los Angeles and sought answers for another jump in suicide rates—the sudden doubling of suicides among the VA's neuropsychiatric hospital patients. At the same time, a survey they had conducted of L.A.-area hospitals, clinics, and emergency rooms revealed that no provisions existed for the follow-up care of suicide attempters. Farberow and Shneidman shared their findings with the National Institute of Mental Health and the VA and proposed the creation of two agencies: a community-based Referral Center for treating the psychological problems of the suicidal, and a Central Research Unit for assessing and investigating suicide among veterans within the VA.

In 1958, Farberow and Shneidman launched the nation's first center of its kind, the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center (LASPC) with the psychiatrist Robert E. Litman, M.D., as its director. Farberow described Litman as, “a free spirit cloaked in psychoanalytic trappings, always intellectually adventuresome and inquisitive.” Together, the three men developed a scientific professional organization where a social and professional vacuum had once existed. Farberow described this as a time of “attraction and excitement in the feeling that we were into a relatively unexplored area of vital community concern.” The objective of the agency—to provide a center for the follow-up care of suicidal patients discharged after treatment in the Los Angeles County Hospital—changed in the first year as calls came in from people in crisis. Capitalizing on the opportunity to intervene and avert a suicide attempt broadened the center's objective to include crisis intervention and 24-hour accessibility of professionals or rigorously trained non-professionals. These efforts led to the development of the L.A. Scale for Assessment of Suicidal Potential and the crisis hotline.