A little over 12 million adults think about suicide a year, a little over 3 million make a plan and a little over a million attempt suicide. Then about 600,000 people received medical attention and the number of people who died by suicide is around 46,000. So, at each ideation to action spectrum, we need something different, and we need responses that look different based on the imminence of risk in a moment. In today’s episode, Dr. Erin Elmore is joined by Ryan Lindsay. Ryan is an associate professor of practice at Washington University in St. Louis at the Brown School, where he chairs, teaches, and advises the students within the mental health concentration in the Master of Social Work program. Ryan specializes in several evidence-based treatments and is currently a certified Dialectical Behavior Therapist and expert in the application of Prolonged Exposure Therapy for complicated PTSD. His work also includes community-level intervention through his involvement in school-based suicide prevention and community-based suicide prevention efforts. Together Erin and Ryan discuss the unique perspective of social work training to look at individuals within the context of systemic access to resources and equity of access, the nuances of suicidality, gaps in our mental health training for risk assessment, and envisioning of new systems of suicide prevention.

Resources

If you are in crisis please contat the National Suicide Hotline. Please text CNQR to 741-741 or call 1-800-273-8255. (+1 for military or veterans)

For more information about suicide prevention, please visit the National Suicide Prevention Resource center at

For more information on the National Institute of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, please visit:

For more information about the Trevor Project, please visit:

For more information about the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, please visit: