Heather Schatten is one of three principal investigators on a five-year research study that uses innovative smartphone technology as a suicide-risk assessment tool. The study, funded by a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, includes a team of researchers from Care New England’s Butler Hospital, Brown University and the University of Michigan. Schatten, a research psychologist at Butler Hospital, and an assistant professor of research at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University, talked with Providence Business News about the grant.
PBN: Explain the smartphone app, Predicting Individual Outcomes for Rapid Intervention, and its role in this five-year study.
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SCHATTEN: The Predicting Individual Outcomes for Rapid Intervention application has three components: data acquisition, data storage and data analysis. In other words, PRIORI captures, stores and analyzes the data from mobile phones. The goal of PRIORI is to understand how an individual’s behavior, such as speech, phone usage or movement, is related to and predictive of different aspects of mental health.
In this study, PRIORI will be used to collect properties of an individual’s speech, such as volume and rate – among many others – recorded on an individual’s mobile phone. This speech data will be linked to information about that individual’s suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The overarching scientific goal of this research is to understand the properties of speech that are associated with and predictive of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
PBN: What role will Butler Hospital, Brown University and the University of Michigan each play in this study?
SCHATTEN: This project would not be possible without a collaboration across institutions and disciplines. Butler Hospital is the primary research site. At Butler Hospital, the research team recruits study participants from the psychiatric inpatient units and the community, interviews participants about their thoughts, emotions and suicidal behavior, and teaches them how to use the study-issued mobile phones. We are also involved in data analysis and will present our findings at scientific conferences.
The University of Michigan maintains the PRIORI program through a collaboration between clinical and computer-science researchers. Speech data collected with the PRIORI program will be stored and analyzed at the University of Michigan. Finally, Brown University will provide unique data analytic techniques and support with our collected data.
PBN: How many participants will Butler Hospital need to recruit, and what’s involved in participating in the study?
SCHATTEN: We will be recruiting 145 individuals who are patients on the psychiatric units at Butler Hospital to participate in our study. Some of these participants will be in the hospital due to a recent suicide attempt, some due to serious suicidal thoughts and others for different reasons, such as substance use or severe depression. In addition, we are recruiting 25 individuals from the community who have no history of suicidal thoughts or mental health treatment.
At the beginning of the study period, participants will be asked questions about their thoughts, emotions, suicidal behavior and psychiatric diagnoses. Then, we provide them with a mobile phone already set up with the PRIORI app as well as another app that collects data about their daily experiences, thoughts, emotions, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors specifically. Later, they will come back to our offices for another interview. Confidentiality and comfort for our study participants is our utmost priority, and we are so appreciative of their participation in our research.
PBN: How significant a mental health problem is suicide or suicidal thinking in Rhode Island, as compared to other states?
SCHATTEN: Suicide is a major public health problem. In 2015, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death across all age groups in the United States, with more than 44,000 deaths by suicide. That’s 13.75 deaths per 100,000. In 2015 in Rhode Island, there were 12.02 deaths per 100,000. This translates to 127 deaths by suicide in Rhode Island in 2015.
In addition to suicide attempts, data for 2014 and 2015 show that more than 4 percent of Rhode Islanders seriously thought about suicide. Among 18- to 25-year-olds specifically, 8 percent had thought about suicide during that same period. Clearly, it is important for us to learn more about the prediction and treatment of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
PBN: What do you hope to learn from the study?
SCHATTEN: Research tells us that many people deny any intent to act on suicidal thoughts before their death by suicide. This suggests that we need to find risk factors for suicide that do not rely solely on an individual’s report. We hope that the results of this study will further our understanding of the role of speech patterns, measured objectively, and in daily life, as they relate to suicide risk. The technology used in this study has the potential to allow for long-term monitoring of individuals at high risk for suicidal ideation and behavior in real time, providing opportunity for prompt clinical intervention and suicide prevention.
Nancy Kirsch is a PBN contributing writer.
