Stopping Suicide: A ...

About this Seminar Recording

This is the third part in a three-part symposium on suicide at BUSPH. BUSPH symposia are conversations about things that affect the health of populations. The first two parts looked at the research on causes and evidence around suicide prevention. Given the research, the relatively little progress public health has made on suicide, and worries during this time of economic and social stressors, this part of the symposia explores what public health can do to prevent suicide.

Note: This seminar was developed and recorded by BUSPH. Our Dean’s Signature Programs bring speakers to our campus to engage in thoughtful conversations about the pressing issues of public health. They are open to our entire community, designed to inform, stimulate, and encourage groundbreaking discussion.

What you'll learn

At the end of the seminar recording, participants will be able to:

• List 5 protective factors that are associated with reduced risk of suicide in youth
• Discuss importance of partnerships with faith communities in the prevention of suicide
• Describe effects of stigma and their possible interventions across levels of analysis (individual, interpersonal, structural) on suicide risk among LGBTQ youth
• List 5 community-based (“non-medical) intervention strategies that have been shown to be effective in preventing suicide
• Discuss possible reasons and potential interventions for elevated risk of suicide post-discharge from hospitalization for suicidality
• Discuss the association of suicide risk and the COVID pandemic and possible interventions to address it

Moderator

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  Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH

  Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, BU SPH

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Sandro Galea, a physician, epidemiologist, and author, is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature, and is a regular contributor to a range of public media, about the social causes of health, mental health, and the consequences of trauma. He has been listed as one of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences. He is chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Galea has received several lifetime achievement awards. Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto, graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.


Subject Matter Experts

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  Sherry Molock

  Associate Professor, George Washington University

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  Mark Hatzenbuehler

  Associate Professor, Harvard
  University

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Mark L. Hatzenbuehler, PhD, is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. He was previously an Associate Professor (with tenure) and Deputy Chair for Faculty Development and Research Strategy in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia. Dr. Hatzenbuehler received his PhD in clinical psychology from Yale and completed his post-doctoral training in population health at Columbia, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar. Dr. Hatzenbuehler’s work examines the role of stigma in shaping population health inequalities, with a particular focus on the mental health consequences of structural forms of stigma. His research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and through the William T. Grant Foundation Scholars Program. He has received several early career and distinguished contribution awards from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. In 2019, he was one of only 204 social scientists named to the prestigious Highly Cited Researcher List by Clarivate Analytics in recognition of his research influence, as demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science. Dr. Hatzenbuehler is an elected fellow of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the premier honorary organization for scientists working at the interface of behavior and medicine, and he has been appointed to serve on two consensus committees at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

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  Lisa Wexler

  Professor,
  University of
  Michigan

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Lisa Wexler, Ph.D., MSW is a Professor in the School of Social Work and at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and her research focuses on suicide prevention, wellness/resilience and praxis. Her community-engaged research engages participants in all levels of the process, responds to cultural and community priorities, and builds on and promotes personal and collective assets. Currently, she is working with community partners test the efficacy of a community mobilization approach to suicide prevention for rural Indigenous communities. The intervention, Promoting Community Conversations About Research to End Suicide (PC CARES), showed great promise in a pilot in Northwest Alaska (R34 MH096884) with results that showed learning and behavior change in attendees as well as close associates of participants. The ripple effect is important, and will be further tested in a larger trial in Bering Strait (R01 MH112458)( see: http://www.pc-cares.org/). Dr. Wexler with Drs. Rasmus and Allen (U19 MH113138) are working to identify vital community targets associated with reduced youth suicide risk within 3 rural and remote regions of Alaska. The study is a central component of a center called, Alaska Native Collaborative Hub for Research on Resilience (ANCHRR) (see: https://www.anchrr.org/). Her school-based research utilizes Intergenerational Dialogue Exchange and Action (IDEA)—a participatory research method—to engage young people in efforts to find local strengths, skills and wisdom through cross-generational and community-based investigations that—through the effort–enhance youth possibilities for action and strengthen their social connections within and outside of their home communities. Lastly, she has been working with tribal partners to develop a firearm lethal means restriction intervention called the Family Safety Net, which is a universal, clinic-based brief intervention to increase home safety. These various projects integrate Indigenous knowledge and participation in research to address local needs while maximizing the study’s public health impact.

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  Natalie Riblet

  Assistant Professor, Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine

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Natalie Riblet is a staff psychiatrist at the White River Junction VA Medical Center, where she has both clinical and research roles. She graduated with an MD from Dartmouth Medical School in 2008 and an MPH from Dartmouth in 2012. She completed her residencies at Dartmouth, including general preventive medicine and public health in 2012 as well as general psychiatry in 2014. After completing a VA fellowship in Patient Safety in 2016, she completed a VA New England Early Research Career Development Award in 2019. As part of this VISN1 CDA, she developed a VA adaptation of the successful World Health Organization Brief Intervention and Contact Program. She is currently an assistant professor of psychiatry and of the Dartmouth Institute at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
In Natalie’s current research roles, she is focused on identifying and testing interventions to prevent death by suicide. This work is supported through funding from the Veterans Rural Health Resource Center White River Junction and the National Center for Patient Safety Center of Inquiry Program. Natalie was also recently awarded a VA Clinical Science Research & Development (CSR&D) Career Development Award. As part of the award period, Natalie will study a suicide prevention intervention that builds off of her prior work with the goal of improving social connectedness and engagement in treatment after psychiatric hospitalization.

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  Julia Raifman

  Assistant Professor, Boston
  University

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Julia Raifman, ScD, SM conducts research on how health and social policies drive population health and health disparities. Much of her current work is focused on evaluating how state and federal policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis are shaping the spread of COVID-19 and mental distress during the pandemic. She created the COVID-19 U.S. State Policy Database (CUSP) to facilitate widespread, rapid response research on how state policies are affecting health and well-being: https://tinyurl.com/statepolicies. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, her research includes analyses on associations between LGBT rights and mental distress and on associations between state firearm policies and adolescent suicide. She also conducts research on how structural stigma and structural racism shape disparities in the burden of infectious diseases such as HIV and COVID-19. Dr. Raifman's research has been covered in the New York Times, The Guardian, National Public Radio, and The Advocate. Dr. Raifman teaches Quantitative Methods for Health Services and Policy Research. She enjoys mentoring and is committed to promoting the success of diverse students. Dr. Raifman received her doctoral and masters degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins prior to joining Boston University.

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  Jaimie Gradus

  Associate Professor, Boston University School of Public Health

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Jaimie L. Gradus is an Associate Professor Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. She received her BA in psychology from Stony Brook University, her MPH with a concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics and DSc in epidemiology at Boston University and her DMSc at Aarhus University. Dr. Gradus's research interests are in the epidemiology of trauma and trauma-related disorders, with a particular focus on suicide outcomes. She was the winner of the 2009 Lilienfeld Student Prize from the Society for Epidemiologic Research for her paper on the association between PTSD and death from suicide in the population of Denmark. Dr. Gradus has been the recipient of multiple National Institute of Mental Health and foundation grant awards to conduct psychiatric epidemiologic research in both veterans and the general population.

Registration

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_{Acknowledgement: This project is/was supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under grant number UB6HP31685 “Regional Public Health Training Center Program.” This information or content and conclusions are those of the author and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsements be inferred by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government.}

_{* Yale School of Public Health, Office of Public Health Practice, a New England Public Health Training Center partner, is a designated provider of continuing education contact hours (CECH) in health education by the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc. All CHES credit inquiries are managed by YSPH}