Pathways to Prevention Workshop: Advancing Research To Prevent Youth Suicide

The goal of the Pathways to Prevention (P2P) program is to host workshops that identify research gaps in a selected scientific area, identify methodological and scientific weaknesses in that scientific area, suggest research needs, and move the field forward through an unbiased, evidence‐based assessment of a complex public health issue. P2P workshops are designed for topics that have incomplete or underdeveloped research and for which it is difficult to produce a report synthesizing published literature.

Closing the research gaps related to youth suicide could lead to improved prevention strategies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is engaging in a rigorous assessment of the available scientific evidence to better understand the importance of identifying efforts that could be effective in preventing suicidal thoughts and behaviors as early as possible. The National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and the NIH Office of Disease Prevention are sponsoring the Pathways to Prevention Workshop: Advancing Research to Prevent Youth Suicide on March 29–30, 2016, in Bethesda, Maryland. The workshop will evaluate the current state of knowledge on youth suicide and identify opportunities for future research. Specifically, the workshop will seek to clarify the following questions:

• Key Question 1: How can national, state, and community data systems be linked to existing data from suicide prevention efforts in order to add possible value for stakeholders? What methods are available to link the data systems?
• Key Question 2: Which statistical methods are reliable and valid for understanding possible mediators and moderators in suicide prevention programs to improve targeting interventions to populations?
• Key Question 3: Which statistical methods are reliable and valid for analyzing linked national, state, and community data systems and suicide prevention data to avoid misleading conclusions?
• Key Question 4: Given the current state of research, what types of methodological/analytic advances would promote further evaluation of youth suicide prevention efforts (e.g., new approaches to data linkage; increased use of common data elements; approaches to intervention harmonization) and facilitate intervention selection and implementation decisions by local community and state-level policymakers?
• Key Question 5: What is the way forward that will help the suicide prevention research community realize the potential benefits of early prevention? What are the immediate and longer-term research investments needed to accomplish this?

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