Assessing and Preventing Youth Suicidality

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Aleksandra Kaurin
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518317891

Suicide claims more than 700,000 lives globally every year, with 9206 deaths by suicide in Germany in 2020. Each suicide affects approximately 135 people per individual, and particularly child and adolescent suicides have long-lasting negative effects on families, schools, and clinical staff. Among youth between 10-24 years, suicide is one of the leading causes of death. In countries with the highest human development index, Germany ranks second in youth suicides (15–24 years), and 25.6 % of 13- to 25-year-old inpatients in Germany reported at least one suicide attempt in their lives. Unlike other leading causes of death among youth, suicide can be prevented when timely interventions are available. Alleviating youth suicidality requires knowledge on accurate and valid assessments thereof. To date, however, our knowledge is vastly limited, most likely because prior studies have primarily assessed suicidality and associated risk factors as relatively distal or static phenomena. Suicidal thoughts and behaviors, however, are unstable and short-lived, likely influenced by contextual and “proximal” risk factors that themselves fluctuate over time. This results in an incongruity between the methods used to study suicidality, the actual timescale on which it occurs, as well as the multidetermined, conceivably idiosyncratic nature of relevant risk factors. This mismatch, we can plausibly assume, is one reason behind 50 years of research with weak effect sizes. Further complicating matters, collecting information about suicide risk (especially in real-time) poses important safety, ethical, and methodological concerns, and the field is dominated by the persistent concern that asking youth about suicide may be harmful (i.e., iatrogenic effects). Thus, before research on youth suicidality and relevant clinical services may advance, these empirical gaps need to be sustainably narrowed. For this reason, I am applying for a scientific network grant to support our endeavor to foster research on youth suicidality. The network will address methodological, conceptual, and practical issues surrounding suicide research in children and adolescents. We will, accordingly, elaborate on, apply, and demonstrate methods for improving assessment approaches of youth suicidality. We will particularly focus on developmentally sensitive intensive longitudinal data assessments (i.e., ambulatory assessments), their clinical utility, as well as potential risks (e.g., iatrogenic effects), and ethical considerations that are paramount to conducting work in this field.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Tina In-Albon