Influential suicide researcher Barbara Stanley dies at 73

His simple idea, for patients to write a plan that would help them overcome a suicidal crisis, quickly caught on in clinical settings.< /p>

Barbara H. Stanley, a psychologist and researcher who developed a simple and effective suicide prevention tool, died Wednesday at a hospice in Scotch Plains, N.J. She was 73. .

His daughter, Melissa Morris, said the cause was ovarian cancer.

dr. Stanley, professor of psychology at Columbia University and director of suicide prevention training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, helped propel major change in the field of mental health as researchers were beginning to view suicide as a separate problem that could be directly treated, rather than a symptom of another disorder.

His most important contribution was an idea deceptively simple. The Stanley-Brown Safety Planning Intervention asks patients struggling with suicidal thoughts to write a written plan that lists coping strategies, as well as sources of support or distraction that might help them get through a crisis. suicidal.

The idea of ​​a written document was not new. For years, clinicians had asked patients to sign a "non-suicide contract", effectively promising their doctors not to self-harm. But there was little evidence that those deals had much effect, said Gregory K. Brown, Dr. Stanley's research partner and director of the Penn Center for the Prevention of Suicide at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2008, when they first tested written safety plans, Dr. Stanley and Dr. Brown saw them as a short-term measure to help patients teenagers to fend for themselves while they waited for slow, labor-intensive treatments. — the real treatment — to have an effect.

But patients immediately identified the written safety plan as so helpful that the team developed it as an intervention autonomous. Researchers have often likened written plans to “stop, drop and roll” fire safety training, or to the safety cards handed out on airplanes – a way to provide very simple instructions to help people make sound decisions. amid overwhelming emotions.< /p>

"There's something about this type of intervention," Dr. Stanley said in a 2019 interview, "that makes them helps you get through this period". Patients, she said, "really like the piece of paper."

She recalls hearing two separate patients who, while standing on bridges and contemplating suicide, changed their minds because they had pulled out their safety plan and had read it. Even years after writing a safety plan, she says, "almost anyone could tell you the exact location, where he was at that exact moment."

"More than two-thirds of people had used their safety plan at least once," she said. "So it was a living, breathing document for them."

Clinicians treating veterans showed immediate interest, and researchers were inundated with requests for training programs, manuals, and materials, even before the technique's effectiveness could be seen. be demonstrated in randomized controlled trials.

Research finally confirmed their enthusiasm.In 2018, a study of 1,640 suicidal patients at veterans hospitals nationwide revealed that two simple emergency department interventions - a written safety plan combined with calls follow-up phone calls - reduced suicidal behavior by 45%. Patients were also twice as likely to receive mental health treatment within six months of their visit.

Dr. Stanley's work has helped reorient suicide research toward practical, concrete and timely interventions, said Paul Nestadt, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies suicide and access to lethal weapons.

"Whether someone dies by suicide depends on that act," he said. "In...