Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Suicide is a serious health problem affecting Canadian youth. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in Canadians under the age of 34, resulting in an estimated 100,000 years of life being lost and a total economic burden of $2.4 billion each year. Adolescent suicide has a long-lasting impact on families, peers and communities. Despite the prevalence and severity of this problem, Canada remains one of the few industrialized nations that has not adopted a national suicide prevention strategy. In short, more work is urgently needed to address this tragic loss of life. Although treatment can reduce suicidal behaviour, a significant challenge for the field is identifying which teens are at greatest risk of acting on their suicidal thoughts. The proposed project brings together what we know about adolescent suicidal behaviour with recent developments in decision-making sciences in order to advance our understanding of how and why some adolescents make the decision to end their lives. Emerging research suggests that the higher rates of risky behaviours among teens may be partly explained by the fact that adolescents weigh the immediate consequences of their behaviour more heavily than the long-term outcomes. Applying this to suicidal behaviour, I expect that suicidal adolescents will show a strong preference for immediate escape from intolerable situations instead of implementing longer-term problem-solving. The proposed project will test this hypothesis by: 1) Developing a new, behavioural decision-making task that is sensitive to adolescents' desire for immediate escape, 2) Examining whether performance on this task differentiates recently suicidal from non-suicidal youth, and 3) Investigating the prospective relationship between task performance and later suicidal thoughts, behaviours and healthcare utilization. This research can improve our current methods for identifying youth suicide risk, and can ultimately bolster prevention and treatment efforts.