Thursday, April 3, 2025
4/3/2025
Helping Guardians Navigate Youth Suicide Risk: Development and Piloting of a Brief Digital Intervention - PROJECT SUMMARY Youth suicide is a significant global public health concern, with evidence suggesting a staggering increase over the past decade, particularly among pre- and early adolescents. Concurrently, the widespread frequent use of social media has reshaped the lives of youth and created substantial opportunity to harness their digital footprints to enhance suicide risk detection on a population-wide scale. Subscription-based digital monitoring apps have emerged with the goal of harnessing advancements in artificial intelligence to identify suicide- related content shared or accessed, and to promptly alert parents to their child’s potential SITBs. These digital suicide risk alerts have the potential to mitigate child SITBs by augmenting the identification of at-risk youth, thereby facilitating prevention efforts. However, alerting parents to potential suicide risk without equipping them with the skills necessary to respond effectively could inadvertently exacerbate youth risk. This R34 application proposes to develop and test a digital single session intervention (SSI) for parents of pre- and early adolescents targeting parental emotion regulation, validation, and suicide-specific monitoring. This intervention seeks to support parents in responding effectively to digital monitoring app-generated suicide risk alerts, thereby decreasing child SITB risk. This project aims to first develop and iteratively refine an SSI paired with a just-in-time digital intervention (JIT) triggered by the receipt of suicide risk alerts received through a digital monitoring app. In Phase 1, we will engage N=20 parents who use the digital monitoring app to co-create and refine the SSI and SSI+JIT intervention prototypes. In Phase 2, we will conduct an open trial with N=15 parents of youth (ages 10-15) screened as at-risk to inform feasibility, acceptability, and final intervention modifications. In Phase 3, we will conduct a pilot RCT among N=99 parents of youth (ages 10-15) screened as at-risk to test the preliminary effectiveness of the SSI and SSI+JIT interventions as compared to enhanced usual care (EUC) on hypothesized parent-focused targets. We will assess intervention targets and outcomes via self-report surveys from parent-child dyads at 1-, 3-, and 6-month follow-up. We hypothesize that parents in the SSI+JIT will evidence the greatest use of targeted skills, followed by parents in the SSI-only and then EUC groups. We also hypothesize that children of parents in the SSI+JIT and SSI-only will report less SI at follow-up compared to children of parents in the EUC condition. Findings from this R34 proposal will inform the feasibility, acceptability, and initial efficacy of a SSI designed to reduce child SITB risk through early parental intervention. This work has important implications for the use of brief digital interventions to prevent suicide among at-risk youth that may be scaled and adapted for a broad range of settings (e.g., emergency departments, pediatrician’s offices, schools) serving parents and children.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).