Family Crisis Therapy Helps Suicidal Teens

Source: PsychCentral
Published: Thursday 03 November, 2011

A new UCLA study suggests a specialized mental health intervention for suicidal youth can help troubled teens. The new approach is welcomed as experts say that roughly 1 million people die by suicide each year.

Researchers studied 181 suicidal youths at two emergency departments in Los Angeles County, with a mean age of 15. of the group, 69 percent were female, and 67 percent were from racial or ethnic minority groups.

For 53 percent of the participants, their emergency department visit was due to a suicide attempt. The remainder were seen because they had thoughts of suicide.

The youths were randomly assigned to either the usual emergency department treatment or an enhanced mental health intervention that involved a family-based crisis-therapy session designed to increase motivation for outpatient follow-up treatment and improve the youths’ safety, supplemented by telephone contacts aimed at supporting families in linking to further outpatient treatment.

Researchers discovered the enhanced mental health intervention was associated with higher rates of follow-up treatment.

Of the participants in the enhanced intervention, 92 percent received follow-up treatment after discharge, compared with 76 percent in the standard emergency department treatment arm — a clinically significant difference.

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