A significant percentage of individuals who die by suicide do not seek mental health services in the time preceding their death. This population is underserved and it is unclear what barriers keep them from seeking treatment. In order to begin a line of research aimed at addressing this high-risk population, this proposal rests on the hypothesis that suicidal individuals who do not seek treatment prior to attempting suicide experience the same psychopathological difficulties as suicidal individuals who do seek treatment - namely, severe emotion dysregulation. However, these non-treatment-seekers will likely require more creative recruitment strategies and briefer interventions than treatment-seeking individuals. As such, this application proposes to use wide-reaching recruitment efforts throughout the community to locate and enroll individuals who are suicidal but not seeking treatment. Further, there is a paucity of empirical support for interventions targeting suicidal individuals. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is one of the few treatments that have been demonstrated to be effective with a suicidal population and is the only treatment whose effectiveness has been replicated. Previous research has suggested that an abbreviated version of the skills that are taught in DBT skills training have effectively reduced emotion dysregulation (i.e., depression and anxiety) in problem drinkers and the format of the proposed intervention is derived from this evidence-based emotion dysregulation intervention. As such, the proposed research is a randomized, controlled pilot trial of a very brief, one-time, skills-based intervention targeting difficulties in emotion regulation and distress tolerance.
This research aims to evaluate the safety of the intervention, the feasibility of the research methods (including the appropriateness of the relaxation training control condition), and to preliminarily estimate the immediate (one week) and long-term (one and three month) changes resulting from the DBT Brief Skills Intervention (DBT-BSI) relative to a relaxation training control on the primary outcomes of suicide ideation and emotion dysregulation as well as a number of secondary outcomes. These results will inform the design of a subsequent full-scale randomized controlled trial of the DBT-BSI.
A significant percentage of individuals who die by suicide do not seek mental health treatment in the time preceding their death. Presumed barriers to treatment-seeking include a lack of appropriately broad advertising strategies and insufficient brief effective interventions targeting suicidal behaviors.
This research aims to use wide-reaching recruitment strategies to reach non-treatment-seeking suicidal individuals and to preliminarily evaluate the effectiveness of a brief, one-time, skills-based intervention for this population.
| Ward-Ciesielski, Erin F; Tidik, Julia A; Edwards, Amanda J et al. (2017) Comparing brief interventions for suicidal individuals not engaged in treatment: A randomized clinical trial. J Affect Disord 222:153-161 |
| Ward-Ciesielski, Erin F; Jones, Connor B; Wielgus, Madeline D et al. (2016) Single-session dialectical behavior therapy skills training versus relaxation training for non-treatment-engaged suicidal adults: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Psychol 4:13 |
