Research team led by Rutgers’ Dr. Jill Rabinowitz and NYU’s Dr. Michael A. Lindsey, with Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Nicholas Ialongo, received a 3-year, $1.5 million R01 grant.
New York, NY, October 2, 2024 －Within the disturbing rise of suicides in our nation’s young people has been an alarming trend: suicide behaviors are rising fastest among Black youth and young adults. However, the reasons for this trend are not well understood. To address that gap in knowledge, a research team led by Dr. Jill Rabinowitz at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Dr. Michael A. Lindsey at the NYU Silver School of Social Work has received R01 research grant funding of $1.5 million over 3 years from the National Institute of Mental Health. They will study how suicide behaviors and thoughts of suicide can manifest in Black youth over time, and affect their life trajectories as they develop and mature.
The study will use survey data collected over 20 years from over 600 Black youth in Baltimore, mostly from low-income families, from the Johns Hopkins Prevention Intervention Research Center’s 2nd generation research trial. Students were recruited upon entry to first grade at 19 Baltimore City Public Schools in 1993 and followed into adulthood through 2013. A variety of factors will be examined to see how they affected children’s mental health and outcomes over time, such as mental health conditions, substance use, academic experiences, life events, racial discrimination, neighborhood environments, exposure to violence, and access to social supports.
“We are thrilled to receive support from NIMH to deepen our understanding of the suicide crisis among Black youth and shed light on factors that may influence their risk or resilience along the course of their development into adulthood," said Dr. Rabinowitz, who is also co-principal investigator for the study.
“The beauty of using this longitudinal data set is that we can start to say that certain conditions actually lead to higher suicide behavior risk, and are not merely associated with that risk. This can be game changing in the study of Black youth suicide risk,” said Dr. Lindsey, who is Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work at NYU Silver, as well as co-principal investigator on the study. “Before now, we have not been able to talk about causes of suicidality in Black children, teens and young adults, tied to their stages of development. The hope is that our findings will enable us to develop better-informed school-based interventions to prevent suicide, as well as to provide evidence that can inform public policies.”
Access to the data will be facilitated by co-investigator Dr. Nicholas Ialongo at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who said, “What is truly unique about this study is that we will be able to examine whether there are any long-term beneficial effects of 2 interventions in the 1st grade that focused on promoting student socioemotional and cognitive development, in terms of later suicidal ideation and behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood.”
Other co-investigators for the study include Drs. Elizabeth Stuart and Holly Wilcox at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Karen Nylund-Gibson at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at University of California, Santa Barbara.
About NYU Silver School of Social Work
Founded in 1960 and renowned for a strong tradition of excellence in direct social work practice and dedication to social justice, NYU Silver has provided rigorous training to more than 20,000 social work practitioners and leaders in every area of the field, making it the leading destination for students who want to become innovative practitioners at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels of social work practice. The School has four campuses in the heart of New York City, Rockland County, Westchester County, and Shanghai.