Resource Types: Guidelines/Recommendations

The following essential competencies for psychiatric registered nurses working in hospital settings as a guide for practice are proposed by the American Psychiatric Nurses Association. These competencies are based on a comprehensive review of the extant research literature (both qualitative and quantitative) relevant to assessment and management of hospitalized patients admitted to a psychiatric setting and are adapted from Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) & American Association of Suicidality (AAS) (2008). Assessing and Managing Suicide Risk: Core Competencies for Mental Health Professionals

In order to achieve a consensus on warning signs for youth suicide, a panel of national and international experts reviewed and analyzed all available literature and conducted a survey of youth suicide attempt survivors, as well as those who lost a youth to suicide. They then convened to achieve a better understanding of the way youth think, feel, and behave prior to making life-threatening suicide attempts and inform others about how to effectively respond. The main goal was to determine what changes immediately preceded suicide attempts or deaths that are supported by research and rooted in clinical practice. The panel consisted of researchers with experience working with suicidal youth, public health officials, clinicians with experience helping suicidal youth, school teachers, and various other stakeholders including individuals representing national organizations focused on suicide prevention.

This document offers guidelines for schools, organizations, and communities to follow after a suicide occurs. Special attention is paid to balancing the needs for commemorating the deceased and preventing a possible contagion effect, as well as addressing trauma issues that may be present.

The Riverside Trauma Center Postvention Protocols provide communities and organizations with recommendations for how to respond to suicide deaths in a way that can help restore functioning to the organization, facilitate the grieving process, and decrease the risk of suicide imitation (contagion effect). Among other topics, the Protocols address the following postvention tasks:

1.   Verification of death and cause
2.   Coordination of external and internal resources
3.   Dissemination of information
4.   Support for those most impacted by the death
5.   Identification of those at risk and prevention of contagion
6.   Commemoration of the deceased

7.   Psychoeducation on grieving, depression, PTSD, and suicide
8.   Screening for depression and suicidality
9.   Provision of services if one or more additional suicides occur
10. Linkage to resources
11. Evaluation and review of lessons learned
12. Development of a system-wide prevention plan

The Protocols summarize generally accepted recommendations for postvention services. The recommendations were developed by the directors of the Riverside Trauma Center, based on the practice literature on postvention services, the guidelines for safe messaging for suicide prevention, and the Riverside Trauma Center team’s experience providing postvention services in Massachusetts. Riverside collects data from postvention services conducted at schools and uses feedback from students and results of screenings to inform the Protocols.

Objectives: 

Administrators and others who use the Protocols will have greater knowledge of how to:

1. Promote healthy grieving by educating community and organization members about the grieving process.
2. Help community and organization leaders determine a safe way to commemorate the deceased within the year following the suicide death.
3. Reduce the risk of further suicide in communities and organizations by increasing knowledge about psychiatric disorders, risk and protective factors, and mental health resources.

Implementation Essential: 

• In the aftermath of a suicide, it is important that community and organization leaders collaborate with service providers and others to develop a coordinated response.

Presents research, clinical expertise, and expert consensus on therapeutic practices related to children’s and adolescent’s sexual orientation and gender identify, and makes the case for eliminating the use of conversion therapy among this population.

A 508-compliant version of this document will be available soon.

Although the current evidence base for the effects of psychosocial interventions is sizable, subsequent steps in the process of bringing a psychosocial intervention into routine clinical care are less well defined. Psychosocial Interventions for Mental and Substance Use Disorders details the reasons for the gap between what is known to be effective and current practice and offers recommendations for how best to address this gap by applying a framework that can be used to establish standards for psychosocial interventions.
The framework described in Psychosocial Interventions for Mental and Substance Use Disorders can be used to chart a path toward the ultimate goal of improving the outcomes. The framework highlights the need to (1) support research to strengthen the evidence base on the efficacy and effectiveness of psychosocial interventions; (2) based on this evidence, identify the key elements that drive an intervention’s effect; (3) conduct systematic reviews to inform clinical guidelines that incorporate these key elements; (4) using the findings of these systematic reviews, develop quality measures – measures of the structure, process, and outcomes of interventions; and (5) establish methods for successfully implementing and sustaining these interventions in regular practice including the training of providers of these interventions.
The recommendations offered in this report are intended to assist policy makers, health care organizations, and payers that are organizing and overseeing the provision of care for mental health and substance use disorders while navigating a new health care landscape. The recommendations also target providers, professional societies, funding agencies, consumers, and researchers, all of whom have a stake in ensuring that evidence-based, high-quality care is provided to individuals receiving mental health and substance use services.

This webpage links to a free downloadable .pdf copy or paperback for purchase.

This app equips providers with education and support resources to assess patients’ risk of suicide, communicate effectively with patients and families, determine appropriate next steps, and make referrals to treatment and community resources.

On September 22, 2014, the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement held a workshop to discuss some of the science of health communication, audiences, and messaging, and to explore what it will take to generate widespread awareness, acceptance, and action to improve health, including through the entertainment media, the news media, and social media. This report summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.