Session Abstract -Assessing and Identifying Risk for Suicide Among Veterans of Military Service

Recent reports of increased rates of suicide among veterans have highlighted the urgent need to increase our understanding of risk among Veteran populations to inform the development of targeted interventions and prevention programs. To begin to address this need, we must increase our understanding of epidemiologic and risk characteristics such as historical trends in Veteran and non-Veteran mortality, sources of support and help seeking behaviors among Veteran populations, use of suicide prevention resources, best practices for ensuring patient safety, and consequences of traumatic exposures. The objective of the proposed panel is to describe results from studies of suicide among Veterans developed as part of a public health approach to addressing risk for suicide including both distal and proximal indicators of risk. The proposed panel will include presentation of results from studies conducted by Bossarte, Knox, and Tu (Identifying Trends in Veteran and Non-Veteran Rates of Suicide: New York, 1996-2005), Crilly and Lewis (The Presence of Suicide Prevention Content in Military or Veteran-Related Blogs and Forums), Kemp, Conwell, King & Thompson (Qualitative Analyses of VA Suicide Hotline Call Logs), Kim & Valenstein (A Comparison of Two Analytic Approaches for Identifying Risk for Suicide Among High Risk Veterans), and Pigeon, Cerulli, Richards & Zayfert (The Relationship of Sleep Disturbances to Suicide and Suicidality in Women Exposed to Partner Violence). The session will be moderated by Kerry Knox, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Excellence for Suicide Prevention at Canandaigua and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester.