A Social Policy Report on Youth Suicide Prevention

• In Event: Past and Future of School-Based Youth Suicide Prevention: Overview and Exemplar from the Field

Abstract

Paper 1 will present findings from a Social Policy Report (Morris-Perez & Abenavoli, proposal accepted, paper in progress) on Youth Suicide Prevention. That report a) details trends in youth suicide, including rates for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ groups (groups understudied in suicidology); b) summarizes theory to guide prevention; and c) reviews research on prevention strategies at the school, community-, and policy-levels to provide a blueprint for decision-making. While clinical research has led to greater availability of effective medications and promising mental health treatments, barriers to intervention services and the prevalence of suicidal antecedents among youth suggests we simultaneously consider a network of effective preventive approaches in normative settings that may be critical “upstream” approaches for prevention (Wyman, 2012; Morris, 2021).

Recently, citing rising suicide rates over the last decade, physicians, psychiatrists, and children’s hospitals declared a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health (AAP-AACAP-CHA, 2021), calling for programs in primary care and schools as part of a multi-pronged strategy. To respond to that call, researchers and policymakers alike need a complete understanding of trends and well-studied prevention strategies to address youth suicide. Yet, the last fully comprehensive review of the epidemiology and prevention of youth suicide is now two decades old (Gould, Greenberg et al., 2003), and relatively unknown by Developmental Psychologists and Prevention Scientists who can learn from and extend this work.

In this paper, we review a) teacher/staff “gatekeeper” programs (e.g., Wyman et al., 2008), as well as a effective youth-aimed school-based programs (e.g., Aseltine et al., 2004, 2007; Schilling et al., 2016; Wasserman et al., 2015; Wyman et al. 2010), that leverage peers as a key influence in adolescence, their roles as trusted confidantes, and as critical in norm-setting; and b) programs at the community level - such as crisis lines (Gould, Jamieson et al., 2003), media-focused interventions (discussing both the risks of media exposure for suicide clusters as well as media messaging for prevention; National Action Alliance, 2021; Chesin et al., 2021; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2021), and effective policy approaches (e.g., Raifman et al., 2017). We do so with explicit attention to the way prevention strategies are aligned with developmental processes unique to the period of adolescence, informed by developmental cognitive neuroscience (Telzer et al., 2018) and developmentally-informed considerations regarding sensitivity to risk and reward, the importance of peers, and needs for autonomy, identity, status, and purpose (Dahl,, 2004; Steinberg, 2014, 2015; Yeager, Dahl, & Dweck, 2018; Wexler, DiFluvio, & Burke, 2009).

While our paper will signal the ways in which youth suicide prevention has evolved over the last two decades, we will also highlight the ways in which the field has fallen short. We conclude with an eye toward innovative approaches that build from the latest developmental, neuroscience, and prevention science ripe for testing by developmental scientists, to set the stage for the next decade of research in youth suicide prevention.

Authors

• Pamela Morris-Perez, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Rachel M Abenavoli, New York University