Investigating the acceptability and effectiveness of digital monitoring for identifying youth at risk of suicide and improving their engagement with crisis helplines

Project Member(s): Milne, D., McAloon, T., Harvard, H., Lam, L.

Funding or Partner Organisation: Suicide Prevention Australia Limited (Suicide Prevention Australia Innovation Research Grant)
Suicide Prevention Australia Limited (Suicide Prevention Australia Innovation Research Grant)

Start year: 2020

Summary: We propose a programme of research that will investigate the acceptability and effectiveness of digital monitoring to improve the rates at which young Australians engage with crisis support when they experience suicidal ideation. We will focus on the 2.6M young people who visit ReachOut.com each year, of whom 12% are suicidal at the time of their visit. We will develop and evaluate—through rigorous machine learning experiments—algorithms to identify suicidal visitors based on their browsing behaviour. We will also develop—through participatory design—interventions that can be triggered by these algorithms to increase engagement with crisis services and reduction of suicidal ideation.

FOR Codes: Mental Health, Pattern Recognition and Data Mining, Health, Clinical and Counselling Psychology, Computer-Human Interaction, Counselling psychology, Context learning, Human-computer interaction