Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
Suicide continues to be ranked as one of the leading causes of death posing a pressing problem for the community globally. In spite of a large body of literature on suicidal thoughts and behaviors, very little progress has been made on both the assessment of suicide risk as well as prevention and treatment strategies. The development of time-effective prevention and treatment modules remains hindered due to insufficient knowledge of reliable mechanisms as well as psychosocial and other risk factors.
MULTICAST aims to address this lacuna by providing a foundation to advance existing psychological and linguistic theory and clinical practice. Specifically, it goes beyond an investigation within a single research area by bringing together the skills and expertise of four disciplines: psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, and data science. Through collaboration, the team members will carry out the project in three steps called PREDICT, EXPERIMENT, and TREAT to achieve the project's specific goals.
The objective of this interdisciplinary project is threefold: (1) identify novel ways of predicting suicidal ideation by examining suicidal patients' language, in particular their use of structural and syntactic features of speech (2) interrogate mechanisms underpinning suicidal ideation through experimental laboratory studies across teams and study sites, and (3) develop effective smartphone-based treatment modules that can be used to improve suicidal ideation in the long run.
With an integrative approach to predicting and treating suicidality, the study`s overarching objective is to deepen our knowledge of the subject matter on both theoretical and empirical fronts. Gaining a detailed understanding of the mechanisms underlying suicidal thoughts and behaviors can have practical implications for clinical practice in that it helps optimize prevention and intervention work in suicidology.
