Measuring the Associations Between Public Education Campaigns and Use of Crisis Support Services

Communication efforts, including public education campaigns, have recently drawn attention for their potential as public health interventions for suicide prevention and mental health promotion. Expert panel reports such as the 2012 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention underscore the important role public messaging can play in facilitating help seeking, however, limited empirical evaluation of its efficacy has been conducted. As such, the objective of this presentation is to discuss methods that can be used to identify campaign effects including their influence on behavior. Specifically, analyses will be presented from models developed and utilized by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) including a varying coefficient regression model employed to assess outcomes associated with the Veterans Crisis Line suicide prevention campaign. Results suggest that public education efforts are associated with statistically significant changes in service utilization for both the targeted and related resources. The presentation will conclude with discussion of the role of 'pathways to influencing behavior' and recommendations for developing an 'evaluation' framework for suicide prevention/mental health promotion messaging.