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

Suicidal thoughts can arise for many different reasons, and the experiences that lead someone toward these thoughts often look different from one person to the next. Research has shown that suicidal thoughts are frequently connected to emotional distress, but the specific emotions involved, and how they unfold in daily life, can vary widely across individuals. For example, one person’s suicidal thoughts may be most closely tied to shame or fear, while another person’s may emerge during periods of sadness or feelings of meaninglessness. Many suicide-specific therapies teach skills that help people manage intense emotions and reduce self-harm risk, including dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). However, these treatments are typically delivered using the same structure for everyone, even though the emotional experiences linked to suicidal thinking may differ from person to person. Researchers have therefore begun exploring whether treatments could become more effective if they were tailored to the specific emotional patterns that precede suicidal thoughts for each individual.

With support from an AFSP Early Career Researcher grant, Dr. Kevin Kuehn developed a new personalized intervention called PRECISE that combines smartphone-based monitoring with therapist-guided coaching. In this proof-of-concept study, five young adults experiencing active suicidal thoughts completed brief surveys on their phones five times per day for six weeks, reporting on their emotions, coping strategies, and suicidal thoughts. These real-time data were used to create individualized models showing which emotions were most closely linked to suicidal thinking for each participant. Clinicians reviewed these patterns during weekly coaching sessions and used them to select coping strategies drawn from dialectical behavior therapy that were tailored to each participant’s emotional triggers. Three participants completed the full program and showed reductions in suicidal ideation and negative emotions over time. Engagement with the monitoring system was high and participants reported strong satisfaction with the intervention. Although the study was small and preliminary, the findings suggest that combining real-time data with personalized therapeutic strategies may offer a promising new direction for suicide prevention.

Citation: Kuehn, K. S., Aguilar, L. S., Foster, K. T., Moore, R. C., & Depp, C. A. (2026). A methodological proof-of-concept of a data-driven, personalized, blended digital health intervention for suicidal thoughts and behaviors: A case series. Internet interventions, 43, 100917. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2026.100917