Suicide postvention for staff and students on university campuses: a scoping review

OBJECTIVE

To examine current knowledge about suicide bereavement and postvention interventions for university staff and students.

DESIGN

Scoping review.

DATA SOURCES AND ELIGIBILITY

We conducted systematic searches in 12 electronic databases (PubMed, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, CINAHL, Africa-Wide Information, PsycARTICLES, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Academic Search Premier, SocINDEX through the EBSCOHOST platform; Cochrane Library, Web of Science, SCOPUS), hand searched lists of references of included articles and consulted with library experts during September 2021 and June 2022. Eligible studies were screened against the inclusion criteria independently by two reviewers. Only studies published in English were included.

DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS

Screening was conducted by two independent reviewers following a three-step article screening process. Biographical data and study characteristics were extracted using a data extraction form and synthesised.

RESULTS

Our search strategy identified 7691 records from which 3170 abstracts were screened. We assessed 29 full texts and included 17 articles for the scoping review. All studies were from high-income countries (USA, Canada, UK). The review identified no postvention intervention studies on university campuses. Study designs were mostly descriptive quantitative or mixed methods. Data collection and sampling were heterogeneous.

CONCLUSION

Staff and students require support measures due to the impact of suicide bereavement and the unique nature of the university context. There is a need for further research to move from descriptive studies to focus on intervention studies, particularly at universities in low-income and middle-income countries.

A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Responses to Live-Stream Suicides on Social Media

Live-stream suicide has become an emerging public health problem in many countries. Regular users are often the first to witness and respond to such suicides, emphasizing their impact on the success of crisis intervention. In order to reduce the likelihood of suicide deaths, this paper aims to use psycholinguistic analysis methods to facilitate automatic detection of negative expressions in responses to live-stream suicides on social media. In this paper, a total of 7212 comments posted on suicide-related messages were collected and analyzed. First, a content analysis was performed to investigate the nature of each comment (negative or not). Second, the simplified Chinese version of the LIWC software was used to extract 75 psycholinguistic features from each comment. Third, based on 19 selected key features, four classification models were established to differentiate between comments with and without negative expressions. Results showed that 19.55% of 7212 comments were recognized as "making negative responses". Among the four classification models, the highest values of Precision, Recall, F-Measure, and Screening Efficacy reached 69.8%, 85.9%, 72.9%, and 47.1%, respectively. This paper confirms the need for campaigns to reduce negative responses to live-stream suicides and support the use of psycholinguistic analysis methods to improve suicide prevention efforts.

Exploring temporal suicidal behavior patterns on social media: Insight from Twitter analytics

A valid mechanism for suicide detection and intervention to a wider population online has not yet been fully established. With the increasing suicide rate, we proposed an approach that aims to examine temporal patterns of potential suicidal ideations and behaviors on Twitter to better understand their risk factors and time-varying features. It identifies latent suicide topics and then models the suicidal topic-related score time series to quantitatively represent behavior patterns on Twitter. After evaluated on a collection of suicide-related tweets in 2016, 13 key risk factors were discovered and the temporal patterns of suicide behavior on different days during 1 week were identified to highlight the distinct time-varying features related to different risk factors. This study is practical to help public health services and others to develop refined prevention strategies, to monitor and support a population of high-risk at right moments.

Treating Suicidality in College Counseling Centers: A Response to Polychronis

This is a commentary on the article by Paul D. Polychronis, "Changes Across Three Editions of The Suicidal Patient: Clinical and Legal Standards of Care: Relevance to Counseling Centers," published in this issue of the Journal of College Student Psychotherapy.

The Impact of Suicide on Co-patients

While there is a large literature on the impact of patient suicide on care providers and on family members, and a small literature on the impact of hospital suicide on inpatients and on surviving members of a therapy group, nothing has been written about the effect of a suicide on patients in a community mental health facility. This paper discusses the potential for ripple effects and the need for extra care and surveillance when a patient commits suicide in an outpatient program for the seriously mentally ill. The paper draws on related literature (suicide in groups, hospitals, schools, and college campuses) and, using examples from a clinic for women with psychosis, makes recommendations for psychiatric intervention post suicide. After the trauma of suicide, staff needs protected time to inform and support survivors, taking special care with those seen as most vulnerable. Following a trauma such as suicide, patients tend to stay near a source of comfort, and may require extra staff time. Survivors need to make sense of what happened and to honor the dead. This brings privacy concerns to the fore, as well as staff ambivalence about the respect due to a person who should be remembered, but should not serve as a role model to fellow patients who are susceptible to contagion effects. The review that follows a suicide can lead to closure for staff and patients and to the development of a protocol to follow should similar incidents recur.