What are the signs that a child might be thinking about suicide?
A Hunter researcher is sharing a four-year, $2.5 million National Institutes of Mental Health grant to find out.
Psychology Professor Regina Miranda of Hunter College – along with her colleagues Ana Ortin-Peralta of Yeshiva University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Lauren Gulbas of University of Texas at Austin – are investigating the signs and expressions of distress, suicidal thoughts, and intent among children. Their goal is to formulate a developmentally and culturally informed assessment to improve prediction of suicidal ideation and attempts among children of diverse races and ethnicities.
“Despite increases in suicides among children, we have no available developmentally and culturally informed measures of how children think about suicide to help us predict risk and inform treatment planning,” Miranda, Ortin-Peralta, and Gulbas write. “Few guidelines also exist for how to integrate caregiver reports into assessments of such risk among children and adolescents.”
Children account for an increasing number of emergency department visits for suicidal ideation and attempts.
According to a study published in JAMA Network Open, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in female preteens from 2001 through 2007 and the fifth leading cause of death from 2008 through 2022, while suicide in male preteens ranked as the fifth leading cause of death for both periods. A total of 2,241 preteens died by suicide from 2001 to 2022, with 31.9% being female and 68.1% being male.
Drs. Miranda, Ortin-Peralta, and Gulbas will study a diverse sample of 150 children ages 8 through 12 who have recently thought about or attempted suicide, along with their caregivers, recruited from emergency departments in New York City and Austin, Texas. The project aims to identify and test profiles of suicidal ideation over time.
That’s important because a recent study showed that most children who attempted suicide do so without a plan, method, or intent in mind. In the absence of those markers of risk, assessments may need an approach that focuses on expressions of distress, the research team suggested.
“We will combine verbal and nonverbal methods, quantitative and qualitative approaches, and caregiver and child reports to overcome limitations of traditional assessments that are mostly based on verbal responses to a few questions about the presence or absence of suicide ideation or attempts,” they said.
Collaborating sites include NYU Grossman School of Medicine/NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue (with Co-Investigator Dr. Evelyn Ashiofu); Montefiore Medical Center, Dell Children’s Hospital (with Co-Investigator John Bedola); and NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln (with Co-Investigator Muhammad Waseem). Co-Investigator Dr. Tyrel Starks of Hunter will serve as quantitative methods expert.
