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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. These presentations delve into emerging literature on suicide prevention and treatment. Anyone is invited to attend.

Notice: For 2027, these spotlight talks will move to the third Friday each month from 9-10am pacific.

If you would like to receive emails about upcoming talks, we recommend signing up for our mailing list.

Upcoming

  • November 19, 2026: Canceled
  • December 17, 2026: CSPAR 2026 Wrapped & Looking Forward
  • Friday, January 15, 2027: TBA
  • Friday, February 19, 2027: TBA
  • Friday, March 19, 2027: TBA
  • Friday, June 18, 2027: Canceled for Juneteenth
  • Friday, August 20, 2027: Canceled for Summer Break
  • Friday, October 15, 2027: Celebrating Life Program with Dr. Novaline Goklish & Team
Register to Attend

Questions? Contact Us

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

Archive

Find recordings of past research spotlights below.

10/15/26: Beyond Showing Up: Treatment Engagement and Access in Suicide Prevention

This talk examines how youth, particularly youth of color, navigate the complex pathway from identifying need to sustaining participation in suicide focused treatment. The session clarifies what “treatment engagement” actually entails and highlights how structural inequities shape access long before a young person enters a therapy office. 

Participants will leave with a clearer conceptual framework and practical considerations for improving engagement and access within their own settings.

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9/17/26: Clinician Survivors of Suicide Loss

The death of a patient by suicide represents a dreaded outcome in clinical care, prompting a range of thoughts and emotions while also requiring clinical and administrative tasks. To address these concerns, we sought to develop a set of resources for faculty, trainees, and staff that would address the emotional, administrative, and spiritual needs arising after a patient suicide.

In this presentation, we provide an update on one element of our work – an animated video based on a fictional narrative that describes a physician’s response to a patient suicide.

We begin by outlining a sequence of events relevant to responding to a patient suicide, follow with a review of how we chose to focus on a fictional narrative, highlight steps in our process of developing the animated video, and end by showing an in-progress draft of our video. Presenters invite participants to share their responses as feedback to inform our work.

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8/20/26: Caring Texts: A Strength-based, Suicide Prevention Trial in Five Native Communities (CARE)

Suicide is a leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities, especially among 10- to 24-year-olds. Much of this can be attributed to the massive social disruption caused by colonization, genocide, and attempts to erase AI/AN culture through forced assimilation. Research has established that connectedness to one’s environment, family, and culture is a strong protective factor that can promote well-being and prevent suicide within AI/AN communities.

Caring Contacts is an evidence-based intervention that aims to foster an ongoing sense of care from an invested individual via brief, non-demanding messages. This intervention has been shown to reduce suicide, suicide attempts, and suicide ideation, is cost-effective, and is recommended by multiple clinical practice guidelines.

The CARE study was a blinded, 2-arm randomized controlled trial aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of culturally adapted Caring Contacts combined with optimal available resources (intervention) compared to optimal available resources alone (control) in reducing suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide-related hospitalizations.

During this presentation, Dr. Comtois reviews culturally adapted suicide care interventions for AI/AN communities and the evidence base for caring contacts. Then she explores how the Caring Contacts intervention was adapted for AI/AN communities in the CARE Study. Lastly, Dr. Comtois reviews results from the CARE study and discuss future directions for this work.

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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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