Role

Dr. Pruitt provides leads a team of highly skilled Suicide Prevention Coordinators and Community Engagement and Partnership Coordinators to implement and operate a comprehensive suicide prevention program for Veterans, including both clinical and public health approaches across Washington State.

Background

Dr. Pruitt is a licensed clinical psychologist in Washington State and has served on several national workgroups focused on suicide prevention including:

• The Military Suicide Research Consortium
• The DOD/VA Data and Surveillance Workgroup associated with Executive Order 13822
• The U.S. Department of Defense Suicide Prevention and Risk Reduction Committee
• The 2019 VA/DOD Clinical Practice Guideline Workgroup for the Assessment and Management of Patients at High Risk for Suicide

Prior to joining the VA in 2018, Dr. Pruitt served as the program lead for the Department of Defense Suicide Event Report from 2014 to 2018. His areas of focus include military and veteran behavioral health, suicide prevention and epidemiology, PTSD treatment, and the use of telehealth to improve patient access to empirically supported treatments. Dr. Pruitt completed his graduate training at the University of Nevada, Reno followed by a fellowship at the University of Washington Department of Psychology’s Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress.

Dr. Pruitt has held industry leadership roles for a variety of projects, including the VA/SAMHSA Governor’s Challenge for Suicide Prevention in Washington State and VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Assessment and Management of Patients at Risk for Suicide. Dr. Pruitt has served on editorial boards for the Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science and Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Publications – Selected Works

• Belsher, B. E., Smolenski, D. J., & Pruitt, L. D. (2019). Positive Predictive Values and Potential Success of Suicide Prediction Models-Reply. JAMA psychiatry, 76(8), 870–871. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.1510
• Pruitt, L. D., Sung, J. C., & Walker, K. A. (2022). What is “safety”?: Lethal means counseling as a cross-cultural communication. Military Psychology, 34(3), 352–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/08995605.2022.2040939
• Pruitt, L. D., Smolenski, D. J., Bush, N. E., Tucker, J., Issa, F., Hoyt, T. V., & Reger, M. A. (2019). Suicide in the Military: Understanding Rates and Risk Factors Across the United States’ Armed Forces. Military medicine, 184(Suppl 1), 432–437. https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usy296

Find Larry Pruitt on PubMed to see a full list of works.