Developing and Testing a Brief, Personalized Intervention for Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States and around the world. Individuals at high-risk for suicide are heterogenous. Despite this heterogeneity, interventions are often developed and tested assuming that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are caused by common factors. The proposed research uses person-specific idiographic quantitative techniques to inform intervention development. In the first aim (N = 5), we will refine a brief, personalized, and adjunctive intervention to help reduce emotional distress, increase effective emotion regulation strategies, and decrease suicidal thoughts. Participants will be recruited from the university counseling center. They will then complete 14 days of surveys delivered to their smartphones (5x/day), answering questions about their emotional states, emotion regulation, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Their data will then be analyzed using idiographic techniques (n=1) to identify person-specific correlates of suicidal thoughts. Participants will meet with a coach to complete a risk assessment, review idiographic data, learn personally tailored skills from dialectical behavior therapy, and finish a personalized safety plan. Participants will be offered up to six sessions. Between sessions, participants will continue to complete surveys to measure progress and update idiographic models. We will obtain feedback from these initial participants and refine the intervention. We will then pilot test the intervention in an open-label non-randomized trial (N = 30), again recruiting students from the university counseling center. We anticipate the intervention will be feasible and acceptable, and that participants’ emotional distress will decrease, effective emotion regulation strategies increase, and suicidal thoughts decrease by the end of the six-week intervention. We hope to test this intervention in a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial. The proposed research marks an initial attempt at developing personalized interventions based on person-specific correlates of suicidal thoughts.