Estimating the rate of identification of youth at risk for suicide by trained gatekeepers

Suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth aged 10-24 and resulted in 4,630 deaths among young people¹ in 2009 alone. Since 2005, 76 State/Tribal grantees supported by the federally funded Garrett Lee Smith Memorial (GLS) program have submitted data on almost 6,000 youths identified at risk for suicide by gatekeepers. The purpose of this presentation is to describe the impact of gatekeeper training on the early identification of youth at risk for suicide through: (1) an analysis of key data related to tracking youth identified as at risk; and (2) a comparison of gatekeeper identification rates with rates of suicidality that can be estimated based on surveillance data. To obtain estimates of the minimum number of identification per adult trainee we will use an ordinal logistic regression with the type of training as the main covariate. To estimate the prevalence of suicide ideation among youth 15-18 and 18-25 for a particular community, a model will be built using data from the YRBSS (2009) and BRFSS (2010), respectively along with its specific demographics from the American Community Survey. Findings suggest possible implications for prioritizing gatekeeper trainings approaches based on trainee characteristics, predictors of service receipt, and circumstances that seem to promote shorter time to service receipt. They push the suicide prevention research and evaluation field to a more detailed, robust and generalizable understanding of how some of the most common strategies to reduce school-aged youth suicide can be improved to more effectively impact intended beneficiaries.