Predicting military and veteran suicide risk: Cultural aspects

Paul Thompson1, Craig Bryan2, Chris Poulin3
1Dartmouth College, 2University of Utah, 3The Durkheim Project


Abstract

This paper describes the three phases of the Durkheim Project. For this project we developed a clinician's dashboard that displays output of models predicting suicide risk of veterans and active duty military personnel. During phase one, we built the clinician’s dashboard and com-pleted a Veterans Affairs (VA) predictive risk medical records study, based on an analysis of the narrative, or free text, portions of VA medical records, In phase two, we will predict suicide risk based on opt-in social media postings by patients using social media websites, e.g., Facebook. We describe the software infrastructure that we have completed for this phase two system. During phase three we will provide a three layer intervention strategy. We discuss our methodology for the three phases, including IRB-approved protocols for the first two phases and a soon-to-be approved IRB protocol for phase three.