PROVIDENCE – Butler Hospital has been awarded a $2.2 million research grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Care New England Health System announced on Monday.
The grant is for the hospital’s study, “Impacts of Sleep Disruption on Ecologically Assessed Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Risk Factors for Suicide,” which aims to identify proximal predictors of suicide.
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Michael Frederick Armey, and Melanie Bozzay will be the study’s principal investigators.
Armey is a research psychologist at Butler Hospital, associate professor of research, department of psychiatry and human behavior, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and associate director of the Consortium for Research Innovation in Suicide Prevention, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Bozzay is postdoctoral fellow at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Providence VA Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology.
For their study, Armey and Bozzay intend to recruit 200 psychiatric inpatients at high risk for suicide.
“While we know who, in general, is at risk for suicide, such as people with mental illness, older adults, men, veterans, and others, these are huge groups, and even in people identified at risk, the chance of any one individual dying by suicide remains low. So, we can use proximal predictors of risk – in the case of this study, technology to monitor sleep and affective, behavioral and cognitive predictors of suicide risk – in the real world,” said Armey.
The study will include baseline assessment of sleep/wake functioning and trait risk factors and use laboratory-based tasks coupled with psychophysiology to phenotype risk processes linked to arousal and cognitive systems, CNE said. The baseline assessment will be followed by four weeks of EMA and digital phenotyping coupled with actigraphy to characterize key state risk factors.
