App Could Help Prevent Suicide
What if there was a tool you could use to reliably identify which of your patients were at risk of committing suicide? What if you could then use that information to intervene before it was too late?
John Pestian, PhD, MBA, director of the Computational Medicine Center at Cincinnati Children’s, has dedicated his career to saving lives in a way few in the medical community can.
Pestian has spent years analyzing thousands of suicide notes to determine the language of suicide. He has published multiple peer-reviewed articles and was awarded a patent for his technology. Now, he’s teaching computers how to listen and report back about what they think they’ve heard from people to try to identify suicidal behavior.
Pestian and his research team have developed an app to get suicidal teens the help they need sooner. The app is called SAM – spreading activation mobile. Four Cincinnati schools are participating in a pilot where the tool is being implemented within the work flow of the clinical counselor.
“Every 14 minutes someone dies by suicide,” says Pestian. “What we’re doing now is the synthesis of 8 years of work by clinicians, scientists and many, many volunteers. The results are based on years of multicenter clinical trials. We’ve reduced all that complexity down to a very simple application so someone can look at it and make sense of it.”
Brian Connelly, PhD, a research fellow on the project, explains, “We’ve taken the conversations of over 400 people of all ages and put them in the app. The app then listens to the words of the patient speaking and determines whether their language is more similar to someone who’s at risk of suicide or mental illness.”
The technology isn’t going to stop the suicide, says Pestian. But it will alert the clinical counselor that there’s an issue so patients get a streamlined path to the care they need.
Mike Sorter, MD, director, Psychiatry, is excited about SAM. “Suicide is a leading cause of death among teens – one of the top three, in fact. But it’s a preventable death,” he says. “Our goal is to treat children who are thinking about suicide, so we’re always looking for better ways to detect the warning signs earlier. That’s why this app has such strong promise.”
Pestian and his team agree. “We hope that SAM will become a national model for the transformation of care for those who have behavioral disorders,” he says.
