Personalized Screen to ID Suicidal Teens in 14 ERs (NIMH)

Emergency Department Screen for Teens at Risk for Suicide (ED-STARS), a recently-launched study in a network of hospital emergency departments (EDs) across the country, will develop and test a personalized, computer-based suicide risk screening tool for teenagers.

“We plan to refine algorithms capable of predicting which youth are most likely to attempt suicide. We will use these to develop a brief and personalized screening tool in which each question presented to a teen is based on the individual’s previous responses” explained Cheryl King, Ph.D. , of the University of Michigan, principal investigator on the NIMH-funded project, along with David Brent, M.D. , of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Jacqueline Grupp-Phelan, MD, MPH of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “After it’s validated, this screen will be made available to emergency departments nationwide as an ED- and patient-friendly tool for screening, risk stratification and triage.”

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among teens aged 12-17, accounting for about 1,000 deaths in 2011 . A 2013 survey indicated that as many as 2.7 percent of high school students nationwide made a suicide attempt resulting in injury or overdose requiring medical attention in the past year. The same survey also found that 8 percent of students reported having made at least one suicide attempt in the past year, and 13.6 percent reported having a plan for how they would kill themselves.