Developing and Testing a Brief, Personalized Intervention for Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors

Overview

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States and around the world. Individuals at high-risk for suicide are heterogenous. Despite this heterogeneity, interventions are often developed and tested assuming that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are caused by common factors. The proposed research uses person-specific idiographic quantitative techniques to inform intervention development. In the first aim (N = 5), the investigators will refine a brief, personalized, and adjunctive intervention to help reduce emotional distress, increase effective emotion regulation strategies, and decrease suicidal thoughts. Participants will be recruited from the university counseling center. Participants will then complete six weeks of surveys delivered to their smartphones (5x/day), answering questions about their emotional states, emotion regulation, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. After the first 14 days, individual participant data will then be analyzed using idiographic techniques (n=1) to identify person-specific correlates of suicidal thoughts. Participants will meet with a coach to complete a risk assessment, review idiographic data, learn personally tailored skills from dialectical behavior therapy, and finish a personalized safety plan. Participants will be offered up to six sessions. Between sessions, participants will continue to complete surveys to measure progress and update idiographic models. The investigators will obtain feedback from these initial participants and refine the intervention. The investigators will then pilot test the intervention in an open-label non-randomized trial (N = 30), again recruiting students from the university counseling center. The investigators anticipate the intervention will be feasible and acceptable, and that participants' emotional distress will decrease, effective emotion regulation strategies increase, and suicidal thoughts decrease by the end of the six-week intervention. The investigators hope to test this intervention in a sequential multiple-assignment randomized trial. The proposed research marks an initial attempt at developing personalized interventions based on person-specific correlates of suicidal thoughts.

Suicide is a public health emergency: an estimated 45,979 people in the United States died by suicide in 2020, and approximately 20% of U.S. youth report having seriously contemplated suicide in the past year. Most interventions for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are developed and tested using group-level (nomothetic) approaches, which assume that all individuals experience suicidal ideation for similar reasons and respond similarly to treatment. However, individuals at high risk for suicide are highly heterogeneous, and prior idiographic (person-specific) research has shown substantial between-person variability in the daily associations between suicidal thoughts and coping strategies. This suggests that personalized interventions, tailored to an individual's unique pattern of risk and coping, may be more effective than one-size-fits-all approaches. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based treatment for self-injurious behavior, but standard DBT is resource-intensive, creating barriers to access. Brief, adjunctive interventions show promise for reducing mental health symptoms and increasing engagement with more intensive services, but existing brief options (e.g., crisis lines) are underused. There is a need for a brief intervention that retains DBT's active ingredients while being personalized and more accessible than standard care. This study will develop and pilot test PRECISE, a brief, personalized, EMA-informed adjunctive intervention for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, delivered via secure videoconferencing by trained coaches. PRECISE integrates components of DBT with idiographic statistical modeling of each participant's own ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data to identify individualized correlates of suicidal thoughts, which then guide functional analysis, safety planning, and targeted skills coaching across up to six sessions. Aim 1 (Months 1-12): Refine the PRECISE intervention manual through expert advisory review and initial testing with 5 participants to evaluate feasibility and acceptability. Aim 2 (Months 13-24): Conduct an open-label, non-randomized pilot trial in 30 participants to evaluate recruitment/retention feasibility, further refine the intervention, and preliminarily examine outcomes. Eligible participants (ages 18-26, active suicidal ideation, English fluency) complete baseline assessments, then begin smartphone-based EMA surveys for the six-week intervention duration. Each session opens with a suicide risk assessment; at-risk participants complete a structured risk management protocol. Primary outcomes are change in negative emotion intensity and adaptive emotion regulation strategy use, analyzed via mixed-effects models. Secondary outcomes include suicidal ideation, coping self-efficacy, and implementation outcomes (adherence, dropout, satisfaction).