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Education and Training > Suicide Research Spotlight Talks

About Monthly Suicide Research Spotlight Talks

CSPAR hosts free suicide research spotlight talks on the third Thursday each month from 9-10am Pacific time. For 2027 spotlight talks, these will move to the third Friday each month from 9-10am Pacific time. These presentations will delve into emerging literature on suicide prevention and treatment. Anyone is invited to attend.

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Upcoming Spotlights

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Questions? Contact Us

Reach out to us at uwcspar@uw.edu or cspartrainings@uw.edu

Archive

Find recordings of past research spotlights below.

7/16/26: Reimagining Suicide Prevention for Black Youth: Advancing Upstream, Strengths-Based Approaches

The crisis of suicide among Black youth and emerging adults has intensified in recent years, yet suicide prevention science has rarely examined how risk and protective processes may operate uniquely within this population. Dr. Jasmin Brooks Stephens’ research program aims to reimagine suicide prevention by integrating the study of sociocultural risk with strengths-based pathways to psychological well-being.

In this talk, Dr. Brooks Stephens presents empirical findings demonstrating how racism-related stress, racial trauma, and other sociocultural pressures contribute to vulnerability to suicidal ideation and behavior among Black youth.

She highlights protective processes that buffer suicide risk and promote positive mental health outcomes within this population. She introduces the Black Youth Thriving Framework for Suicide Prevention, a strengths-based conceptual model that shifts the field beyond crisis-oriented intervention toward the proactive cultivation of developmental assets that support resilience and thriving. Finally, she outlines future directions for her research, including the advancement of upstream, community-engaged prevention science that centers youth voice, integrates mixed-methods methodologies, and translates empirical findings into sustainable systems of care designed not only to prevent suicide, but to promote flourishing among Black youth.

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3/19/26: Increasing the Efficacy and Accessibility of Suicide Prevention for the Disability Community

The disability community represented approximately 30% of the US population and exhibits heightened rates of suicide attempts when compared to the general population. However, limited suicide prevention intervention research has identified or addressed the needs of this population. This presentation discusses findings from an ongoing trial of telehealth delivered Brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention (BCBT), which is the first clinical trial of a suicide prevention intervention in the disability community. Future directions and considerations for suicide prevention research with the disability community are discussed. 

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1/15/26: Decolonizing Suicide Prevention Implementation: Implementation Strategies for Crisis Planning Among Diverse Global Populations

Low- and middle-income countries account for 75% of global suicide deaths but produce less than 10% of research. South Asia has the highest rate of female suicide fatalities worldwide. In this talk, Dr. Ashley Hagaman discusses research to address the disparate burden of suicide through decolonized and co-designed interventions and implementation strategies to optimize their uptake in resource strained settings. We highlight culturally anchored forms of safety planning (and its implementation) that privilege local ways of knowing, doing, and accessing help. We also highlight strategies to measure implementation domains of fidelity, acceptability, and quality.

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12/18/25: CSPAR Wrapped 2025

Over the past year, we’ve featured CSPAR research projects like the ISACC Pilot and the Searchlight Study alongside presentations from our colleagues on THRIVE or Where’s the Evidence for Evidence Based Suicide Prevention? just to name a few.

In our final spotlight for 2025, we reviewed other work happening in the Center for Suicide Prevention and Recovery. Four teams shared the work they’ve been doing this past year. Topics include:

Informing 988 Guidelines for Working with High-Risk Populations

This summer UW CSPAR partnered with HMC Behavioral Health Institute and Equity Is. on a project for Washington’s Healthcare Authority (HCA) to create guidelines and training recommendations for 988 crisis line workers answering calls from people in populations at high risk of suicide, including Veterans, BIPOC, those who identify as LGBTQIA+, and more. Our presentation will review the findings from our literature review and environmental scan exploring the best practices for supporting these groups.

A Rapid Group Analysis Process of Participants’ Periods without Suicidal Ideation

Using data from the Searchlight Study, we analyzed qualitative responses describing participants’ with lived experience of suicidality periods with no suicidal ideation utilizing the Rapid Group Analysis Process (Rap-GAP). Themes from this analysis and the process of conducting this analysis method will be presented in this spotlight.

UW Suicide Care Team Planning Grant

The Suicide Care Team Planning Grant is a 1-year project focused on developing a UW-based Suicide Care Team (SCT) that can respond promptly to referrals of acutely suicidal patients from across the UW system and offer timely follow-up, evidence-based treatment, and care navigation for referred patients, as well as consultation services for providers. Over the past year, the project team has been working on a strategic plan that both meets the needs of the UW community and is financially sustainable, with the intent of launching a 3-year demonstration project funded by Four Pines and approved by UW Medicine starting in 2026. This presentation with highlight work to date and some of the plans for 2026.

DBT Next Steps – Online Clinician Training

DBT Next Steps offers six new DBT skills modules focused on what comes next in recovery for people who have stabilized in DBT. In this presentation, DBT Next Steps book co-author and CSPAR teaching faculty, Adam Carmel, will discuss the development of an online self-paced DBT Next Steps training for DBT clinicians to learn to deliver DBT Next Steps launching in 2026.

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10/16/2025: Putting Recovery at the Center: Preliminary data on THRIVE in Crisis Stabilization Centers

More than 5.3 million individuals at risk for suicide seek treatment through emergency departments (EDs), despite the fact that EDs are not well suited for their care. Crisis Stabilization Centers (CSCs) are a person-centered alternative to EDs. CSCs are community-based, recovery-focused centers that operate 24/7 and accept suicidal persons into their receiving centers via crisis walk-ins, police drop-offs, and ED transfers. More than 600 CSCs are operational nationwide and are rapidly expanding across the United States due to the 988 Lifeline expansion. However, research on CSC care outcomes are severely limited, have mixed results, and are difficult to interpret due to methodological constraints. Importantly, CSCs currently have no brief, recovery-focused psychological interventions that can be deployed in this setting with demonstrated effectiveness for reducing suicide risk.

Toward Recovery, Interpersonal growth, Values, and Engagement (THRIVE) is a suicide recovery and care transitions program. THRIVE is theoretically rooted in the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide. In this presentation, Dr. Lockman will describe the theoretical framework for THRIVE, share preliminary data, and discuss the importance of a paradigm shift toward recovery-focused interventions to help suicidal persons not only stay safe and “not die” but THRIVE.

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9/18/2025: Detecting Suicide Risk from Short Term Risk Factors and Google Searches: A Prospective Longitudinal Study over One-Year

Social media and search engine companies, such as Google, use the wealth of data at their disposal to create algorithms to predict suicide risk, and provide interventions based on company policies and outputs from these algorithms. Neither the details of these algorithms nor their accuracy in risk prediction are shared with the public, thus research is needed to verify whether algorithms applied to search engine data can accurately predict suicide risk. To address this gap, the Searchlight Study recruited 485 adults with lived experience of suicidal thoughts and behavior to participate in a gold standard interview of their past year suicidal thoughts and behavior, complete prospective surveys of suicidal thoughts and behavior every two weeks for one year and donate their Google Search and YouTube data for this entire period.

In this presentation, members of the Searchlight Study team will share important lessons learned from conducting research entirely online, recruiting participants, and acquiring Google Search data from said participants. They will present the main findings of the study, including development of ‘features’ (i.e., categorization of searches) from participants’ Search data and detection of heightened suicide risk utilizing the developed features. In addition, we will present the associations between warning signs for suicide attempts and short-term changes in suicidal ideation from our prospective surveys.

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8/21/2025: Rumination, Mindfulness, and EMA (RUME) Pilot Study: Exploring Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) Methods To Enhance Use of Digital Mindfulness Apps for Non-Suicidal Self-Injury

Non suicidal self-injury (NSSI), intentional self-inflicted injury to one’s body with no suicidal intent, is one of the strongest predictors of future suicidal ideation and attempts. People with NSSI are found to have greater emotion dysregulation, greater rumination, and poorer executive functioning, all of which can lead to difficulties with consistent skills engagement. Mindfulness – a core skill in evidence-based treatments for NSSI – has been found to target many of these deficits and may be particularly relevant due to a proliferation of digital mindfulness interventions (DMI) in recent years. Although DMI have potential, cognitive-affective deficits underlying NSSI may exacerbate difficulties with effective and consistent use of DMI to receive its benefits.

In this presentation, Dr. Cheung will share findings from the pilot study, RUME, that aimed to develop a program of ecological momentary assessment (EMA)-based habit-formation strategies to boost user engagement and treatment effects of a DMI app. The presentation will highlight quantitative and qualitative feedback from participants that were used to inform design considerations, as well as explorations on the use of EMA as both an intervention and outcome measure in self-harm research.

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7/17/2025: Detecting suicide risk among U.S. Service members and Veterans

Suicide is a leading cause of death among U.S. military Service members and Veterans. Unfortunately, many military personnel at risk for suicide do not receive mental health treatment due to both attitudinal (e.g., stigma) and structural barriers. One way to improve resource availability for at risk individuals outside of traditional healthcare settings is to harness social media. Self-disclosures related to mental health and suicide are relatively common on social media, which may provide an opportunity to identify people who would likely benefit from help.

In this presentation Dr. Zuromski discussed how her research team developed an algorithm to identify posts with suicide-related content on a military-specific social media platform and the implications of this research.

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5/15/2025: Informatics Supported Authorship of Caring Contacts (ISACC) Pilot: Innovations, Findings, And Lessons Learned

Caring Contacts (CC) is one of the few low-cost interventions demonstrating protective effects against suicide and has been demonstrated to potentially positively affect other areas of an individual’s mental health besides reducing suicide attempts and ideation. However, CC is inconsistently implemented and can be labor intensive, limiting its adoption and impact. For an intervention to be effective, it must be easy to use (usable), realistic to implement in daily life (feasible), and perceived as supportive and relevant by its users (acceptable). As such, the pilot team conducted a needs assessment using qualitative methods including focus groups, interviews with participants as well as our pilot experience to inform the design considerations for an informatics tool to facilitate the CC intervention and a toolkit to help users implement this scalable intervention.

In this presentation, the study team will share findings from pilot work and how these findings informed the development and optimization of our CC web-app and toolkit. They highlighted methodological innovations that were piloted and are now being used in our clinical trial including the co-design method, strategies for online recruitment, and the use of EMA blocks to examine the effectiveness of ISACC and explored the active mechanisms involved in the intervention.

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