Suicide risk study funded through $2.9M federal grant

PROVIDENCE – A $2.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health will support a suicide risk study by researchers at Care New England’s Butler Hospital, Brown University and the University of Michigan.

The grant, announced Tuesday, will allow for a five-year research study utilizing the smartphone app PRIORI (Predicting Individual Outcomes for Rapid Intervention), which was designed by a group at the University of Michigan. Using the app, researchers will record and analyze changes in speech patterns to identify how they relate to changes in suicide risk.

According to a press release about the grant from Care New England, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and is responsible for 42,000 deaths in the country each year.

“It is our hope that results of this study will have implications for both prevention and early intervention of suicide, and that the smartphone technology will provide methods for monitoring patients’ suicide risk over time,” Dr. Heather Schatten, a research psychologist at Butler Hospital and assistant professor of research at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in a statement.

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Schatten, one of three principal investigators for the study, is joined by a multidisciplinary team including research psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists and engineers, and a quantitative scientist.

Dr. Melvin McInnis, a University of Michigan Health System psychiatrist who leads the team that developed the program with funding from the Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Fund, said they are pleased about the “first test” of the app outside Michigan and “in a patient population with diverse diagnoses.”

Recruitment for the study begins this month; participants will be recruited in a psychiatric inpatient setting, which, according to the release, is “an important population given the elevated suicide rates in the weeks and months following hospital discharge.”

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