This seminar will provide an overview of the evidence for universal, selective, and indicated suicide prevention.
Suicide prevention is a relatively new research field and there is much that we don’t know, as evidenced by the increasing suicide rates in Australia over the past decade. This seminar will briefly review known risk factors at the policy, environmental, community and individual level before describing in more detail what we know about prevention. The seminar will review evidence-based prevention strategies at the universal, indicated, and selective level, and will conclude by describing international and national attempts to integrate these strategies into a comprehensive suicide prevention framework that can be implemented at a regional level. The seminar will describe the evidence for these frameworks and discuss some of their barriers and limitations.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Fiona Shand, B Sc (Hons), M Clin Psych, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Black Dog Institute, LifeSpan Research Director, and NHMRC TRIP Fellow. Since being appointed to the NHMRC CRE in Suicide Prevention in 2012 she has developed a research program in suicide prevention that spans large-scale multi-level models of suicide prevention (including school-based interventions), crisis and aftercare, health service interventions, Indigenous suicide prevention, and e-health. She is a CI on the NHMRC Centre for Research Evidence in Suicide Prevention (CRESP II, 2019-2023), for which she is stream leader for crisis and aftercare. Fiona is CIA on the iBobbly Indigenous youth suicide prevention app trial, the first suicide prevention app for young Indigenous Australians. She is the research director for LifeSpan, a suicide prevention framework developed for the NSW Mental Health Commission and now funded at $14.7m.