This issue of the newsletter will cover a few recent developments and serve as a spring reminder that several new resources have been made available to QPR Certified Gatekeeper Instructors over the past year.

News! A team of four advanced QPR clinical instructors provided extensive training in suicide risk assessment to over 300 Veterans Administration clinicians. It was rewarding to assist such an able and competent group of professionals - whose work we all appreciate and support.

News! 449 new QPR Certified Gatekeeper Instructors have been trained in 2008 to date. Congratulations and welcome.

Research Published: Three peer-reviewed research papers on QPR have been published in recent months, most stemming from work conducted by our colleagues at The University of Rochester Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide. To see these abstracts, click here. The state of Virginia has also released their findings from a statewide evaluation of QPR and ASSIST (click here). For those interested in a cost-to-detect a new case comparative analysis, please email Brian Quinnett at bquinn@turbonet.com

Query: As the QPR Institute is planning an early fall submission of materials for registration as an evidence based practice with SAMSHA, we are in the process of collecting any evaluations or research that has been completed and reported on QPR Gatekeeper training. Should any of you have such a report, we would be most appreciative if the report could be forwarded directly to Paul Quinnett at pquinnett@mindspring.com. Thanks.

Reminder: In your training to become a QPR Certified Gatekeeper Instructors, efforts have been made to help you help others drop the word “commit” when describing death by suicide and, instead, use terms like, “died by suicide.”

Because of hundreds of years of common language use, it is difficult to help English speakers break this habit. Yet we know words have power and meaning. The verb to “commit” has long been associated with criminal activity as in, “he committed a felony.”

You will note in your official QPR training slides the word “commit” does appear as a direct quote (an example of a warning sign) from someone who actually went on to die by suicide. Thus, you may find this moment in your training to insert a comment about how we might all move the dial in suicide prevention ahead by making an effort to disassociate the word commit from the act of suicide. Thanks.

Request: In our effort to support suicide prevention research, we have a request from a doctoral student interested in finding clinicians who have lost a client to suicide. The purpose of this research study is to examine posttraumatic growth in clinicians who have survived the suicide death of someone they served. This study has an approved IRB and should take approximately 15 minutes. For those of you working in a clinical setting as a mental health provider we at the QPR Institute strongly encourage participation, as the death of a client by suicide can have career-ending consequences. Too little support, tolerance and understanding has been extended to clinicians who have experienced such losses. Just click here if you wish to participate.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Xmi1cwmr88R5DfoLA2_2fFbA_3d_3d

Insightful Newspaper Article on Suicide: Written by a freelancer, Donald Clegg for the Spokesman-Review, our local paper, we found this article worth reading and circulating to others. View article.

Update and Helpful Tip: One QPR instructor was asked during Gatekeeper training about why there are such different rates of suicide between racial and ethnic groups. Here’s the answer we sent by email, in that may prove helpful to you.

“Accounting for different suicide rates among racial and ethnic groups is very challenging. No one has any simple answers to this question. Cultural and religious values, social cohesion, availability of means and economic factors all come into play, as well as genetics, presence of or vulnerability to, mental illnesses, availability of medical care and help-seeking attitudes and behaviors.

For example, gender differences in rates are often attributed to male use of more lethal means when attempting suicide. Even this argument does not hold up in countries where firearms are not available. In China the majority of completed suicides in rural areas are by females. Because females attempt more frequently than men, and in rural China the method available is overdose on insecticides or pesticides, women who might have been saved from a non-fatal overdose cannot get to medical care and die, as few or no emergency medical services are available.

Low African American suicide rates (especially among females) have been attributed to close family relationships, responsibility for children, the fact that black females often seek support from one another and an old cultural tradition from America’s slave period, e.g, “Strong blacks, don’t crack.” Higher attempt rates among Latinos (especially youth) have been attributed to cultural conflicts, generational frictions and the possible transition-stressed fragmentation of what has historically been the strong, close-knit Hispanic family.

To answer this audience question as best you can, it is recommended that you research the ethnic and cultural groups you might be training to learn more about beliefs, cultural values and unique risk and protective factors specific to that group.

You can also note that research is ongoing and all the answers are not in. We do support much greater funding for suicide prevention research (100 million dollars would be a nice start), and especially the study of racial and cultural groups with low base rates for suicide. The answer to preventing suicide in high risk groups may well lie in learning what is protective and replicating those interventions where needed.

Remember, suicide is the most complex and perhaps least understood area of human behavior, so “why” questions are really tough to answer.”

Staff and Faculty
QPR Institute