Helping Parents Navigate Child Suicide Risk
Suicide is the leading cause of death of youth worldwide and there is evidence that it may be worsening. To help reverse this trend we need new methods to identify teens and pre-teens who are at risk of suicide. Widespread cell phone use among these youth combined with their willingness to divulge personal feelings online often before telling families or anyone else directly make cell phones a potentially valuable tool to identify these troubled youth.
Alongside her colleagues Taylor Burke, PhD and Alex Bettis, PhD, Kathryn Rebecca Fox, PhD, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at University of Denver, is using an MRI grant to build and test a brief, evidence-based tool to empower parents to use the Bark cell phone app, to effectively support their children when they receive suicide risk alerts.
The goal of the research is to develop and pilot test a mobile intervention that can be delivered to parents in real time immediately after they receive an alert through Bark. The project’s aim is to help parents to 1. Provide emotional support and validation to their children, 2. Assess their children’s suicide risk, 3. Restrict access to lethal items in the child’s vicinity, 4. Connect their children to professional mental health services, if indicated, and 5. Proactively check in with and monitor their children for risk.
Bark is a cell phone app developed to help parents and schools monitor the safety of children’s digital interactions. Bark has developed algorithms to identify these young people’s suicide risk. When suicide risk is detected Bark alerts parents that their children may be at risk of suicide and provides parents with information about connecting to crisis lines and resources about how to talk to their children about suicide. Unfortunately, these suicide risk alerts leave many parents overwhelmed, scared and uncertain about how to help their children. In addition, parents may respond in ways that are harmful rather than helpful by not trusting the app’s findings believing that the app may have overreacted.
Dr. Fox and her team are assessing parents’ thoughts, feelings and reactions to the Bark suicide notifications and evaluating parent interest in an intervention program to help them navigate managing these notifications. Parents are asked to provide feedback on the perceived utility of the above-mentioned skills 1 - 5 and to indicate what additional information and tools would be most important for them in an intervention program. This will be assessed both immediately after the alert and in the period after the alert. Based upon this parent feedback, the team is developing a brief psychoeducation intervention to be administered to parents upon receiving Bark notifications. Real time reminders will be tailored to suicide risk.