Grant: Project Grant

Suicide among Public Safety Personnel (PSP) is an important public health problem. While there is research exploring rates of suicidal thoughts and self-harm, risk factors for suicide, and how to best provide mental healthcare to PSPs, there is very little literature exploring how PSP organizations manage the complexities following a member suicide death and even less literature on how families experience these organizational responses. To address this, we will conduct qualitative interviews with the next of kind of PSP members who have died by suicide to explore the precursors of PSP suicide (including warning signs and stressors), help-seeking behaviours before the suicide, their interactions with the PSP organizations (including the death notification, pathways to entitlements or benefits, and commemoration/ memorialization), and how to engage families in PSP suicide prevention. We will also conduct interviews with relevant parties from PSP organizations will explore how organizations view members suicides in comparison to other line of duty deaths, what organizations are already doing to meet the needs of families following a member suicide, barriers, and facilitators to implementing policies and procedures to support families, uncertainties related to policies and procedures, and organizational readiness in terms of implementing practices support family members. Using this information, we will then host a knowledge sharing workshop with groups that support families, PSP organizations, and people with lived experience to develop a family-centered suicide response guide for PSP organizations.