T2’s surveillance programs monitor suicide events across the DoD, providing the opportunity to study risk and prevention factors in military personnel.

• Data collection software ensures success of the world-wide suicide surveillance mission
• Ability to analyze and report on suicide factors in real-time
• Opportunity to examine data across the Department of Defense

DoD Suicide Risk Management & Surveillance Office (SRMSO)

Suicide prevention is a key goal in the DoD’s psychological health mission. T2 has a team dedicated to examining and utilizing technology solutions to support suicide prevention and surveillance. This office, the Suicide Risk Management & Surveillance Office (SRMSO), engages in suicide surveillance efforts, research, and special projects to improve suicide prevention knowledge. Examples of SRMSO’s efforts include the following:

Department of Defense Suicide Event Report (DoDSER)

The Department of Defense Suicide Event Report is a sophisticated web software system that allows the military to capture detailed information about suicide events. Historically, all the service branches used idiosyncratic suicide surveillance systems. In January of 2008, the DoDSER was launched as a DoD solution to monitor all branches of the military. The DoDSER enables DoD-level data collection and reporting of suicide events and potential risk/protective factors. For the first time, the opportunity to examine detailed characteristics of suicide behaviors across the DoD and between the Services is available. In addition, it provides a surveillance system to detect how these risk factors may change over time as the DoD mission or military population changes. This information can then be used to help characterize suicide events across all Services for senior leaders and other stakeholders in the DoD’s suicide prevention mission.

As a new program, the DoDSER system is undergoing additional improvements and refinements. An initial web-based training system was recently added to the website, and a refined coding manual is under development. T2 is also piloting a system that could be used to collect control data to estimate the frequency of DoDSER variables in the broader population. This information would be very useful for identifying suicide risk factors in the military population.

Suicide Prevention: Caring Letters Project

There is a dearth of quality research available on effective suicide prevention practices. To our knowledge, only one suicide prevention approach has reduced suicide rates in randomized, controlled trials. It involved regularly mailing “caring letters” to high-risk individuals hospitalized for depression or suicidal behaviors (Motto & Bostrom, 2001). T2 is implementing a caring letters pilot program to improve our knowledge about the potential of similar programs in military populations.

Partnerships/Collaborations

Army, Air Force, Navy and the Marines.