Research, practice, and data informed investigations of child and youth suicide: A science to service and service to science approach.

BACKGROUND

Suicide rates for children and adolescents have been increasing over the past 2 decades. In April 2023, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) convened a two-day workshop to address child and youth suicide.

PURPOSE

The workshop focus was to discuss the state of the science and stimulate a collaborative response between researchers, death investigators, and data collection teams to build a science to service and service to science approach toward understanding - and ultimately preventing - this growing problem of child and youth suicide.

HIGHLIGHTS

Topics that meeting participants highlighted as worthy of further consideration for research and practice were: increasing awareness among death investigators, medical examiners, and coroners that child suicide deaths under age 10 years do occur and should be investigated and documented accordingly; emphasizing the value of science based protocols for child and youth death investigations to enhance consistency of approaches; and articulating needs for postvention services to suicide loss survivors.

OUTCOMES

The importance of collecting an accurate and complete cause and manner of death (i.e., unintentional, suicide, homicide, undetermined) among all child decedents, and demographic information such as race, ethnicity, and sexual/gender minority status was underscored as critical for enhanced surveillance. For prevention efforts, approaches to assessing and understanding suicidal thoughts and behaviors among diverse groups of children, and the variability in proximal and distal risk factors are needed to inform opportunities for preventive interventions for diverse communities. The need for consistent measures and processes to improve death investigations, fatality review committees, and coordination between data collection systems and agencies was also raised.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Collaborations among researchers, death investigators, and data collection teams can help to fully describe the child and youth suicide crisis and provide actionable information for new research, and prevention and response efforts.

Informations de copyright

Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.