A troubled teenager is hospitalized with suicidal thoughts. The patient is diagnosed, medicated, and counseled by a team of experts.
The teen is sent home a few days later, and the following week the parent finds the child’s bedsheets fashioned into a noose.
The scenario is tragically common in the field of psychiatry, which has long struggled to develop strategies to help adolescents cope with recurring thoughts of suicide in the weeks after leaving the hospital.
A preliminary study from UT Southwestern’s O’Donnell Brain Institute shows an intervention program that includes a personalized app could make a difference: Researchers found the rate of attempted suicides by teenagers who received the intervention was halved compared to those who received the standard care during their hospitalization.
The intervention program is brief—about three hours—and consists of therapists offering various coping strategies and learning some of the patient’s favorite activities and fond memories. This information is programmed into an app that the teen uses after being discharged from the hospital.
The app, called BRITE, prompts them daily to rate their mood and offers personalized recovery strategies when they’re distressed. For instance, one patient may be encouraged to play an enjoyable video game or sift through family photos that were uploaded to the app. Another may watch a meditation video, or—if all else fails—access the suicide emergency numbers programmed into BRITE.
The study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry tracked the cases of 66 patients ages 12-18 who were hospitalized after attempting or contemplating suicide. Thirty-one percent of those who received standard care attempted to kill themselves within 24 weeks of being sent home; the rate was nearly halved for those who received the intervention program and app.
The research comes amid a rising national suicide rate, particularly among teenagers. From 2007-2015, the adolescent suicide rate doubled among females and increased 30 percent among males. Previous research estimates a large proportion of these suicide attempts occur in the first three weeks of outpatient treatment following a hospital stay.
