Mobile Health Technologies for Suicide Prevention: Feature Review and Recommendations for Use in Clinical Care

Abstract

Keywords mHealth I Mobile applications I Apps I Technologies I Suicide I Self-directed violence Opinion statement Mobile devices, and the apps (software applications) that operate on them, have potential to help manage and prevent suicidal behavior by assisting with assessment of risk, providing educational and support information, and facilitating access to safety plans, crisis support, and coping tools. This clinician-friendly review provides an overview of the principal features of currently available mobile health apps that are specially designed for suicide prevention. The use of patient contact interventions (i.e., text messaging and email interventions) on mobile devices is also discussed. Recommendations for selecting and integrating these tools into patient care are provided, along with discussion of emerging capabilities and limitations including the lack of research regarding the clinical effectiveness of mobile health apps. The topics presented should be informative to individual practitioners as well as health care organizations that are considering adopting these technologies into their services.

Caring E‐mails for Military and Veteran Suicide Prevention: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…In the current study, the e‐mail delivery of the messages differed from all prior studies. A possible advantage of e‐mailed caring messages, like text messages, is that they can be accessed at any time and everywhere on mobile devices (Luxton, June, & Chalker, ). While initial data suggest that military personnel prefer e‐mailed CL over postal mail (Luxton et al., ), it is possible that the modality is less effective than other delivery methods.…”

Technology for Our Future? Exploring the Duty to Report and Processes of Subjectification Relating to Digitalized Suicide Prevention

“…This has led Facebook to implement its own suicide prevention programme based on algorithmic scouring of Facebook posts. An example of the latter category would be smartphone apps to help people to manage their suicidal ideations, some of which even have an immediate contact button so that with one click a helpline or a friend is called [7]. Often these two reasons are combined in one initiative.…”

“…Certain groups, such as middle-aged men, teenagers and adolescents, and LGBT-I populations are disproportionately affected [3][4][5][6]. Traditional approaches to suicide prevention have not been as successful as hoped for [7,8]; and attempted suicide is notoriously difficult to predict, even for those who work with suicidal patients on a regular basis [9,10]. A range of public and private actors, including social media companies, have started to use big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to construct risk scores that may help predict who is most at risk of committing suicide, or use mobile health technologies to enable contact with people who are suicidal [7,8,[11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

“…The aim of this article, then, is to: (a) explore two key legal and social issues related to digitalized suicide prevention; (b) by drawing on psychiatric and health services literature discussing digitalized suicide prevention initiatives; and (c) by connecting also to social scientific literature, for instance that of critical suicidology and the philosophy of psychiatry, which has not generally been drawn upon in thinking through digitalized suicide prevention (although, for an exception, see: [13]). As the use of digitalized methods for suicide prediction and prevention is likely to increase in the coming years [7], it is imperative to discuss at an early stage what the ethical, legal, and social consequences might be, and, subsequently, to follow such initiatives empirically.…”

An Electronic Clinical Decision Support System for the Assessment and Management of Suicidality in Primary Care: Protocol for a Mixed-Methods Study (Preprint)

“…Most importantly, it could save the GP work and time by generating a risk assessment and management plan that can be shared with a service user and carer(s) or with specialised mental health services. Emerging evidence suggests that technology based suicide prevention developments can assist clinicians with the identification and management of suicide risk, by providing clinical decision support [26]. However, this is still an underexplored area.…”