Project

Suicide and overdose Harm Impact Evaluation using Linked Data (SHIELD)

Project Description

The SHIELD project is a cooperative agreement between Johns Hopkins University (with PI Holly Wilcox) and SDRG (with Co-PI Marina Epstein), with the potential for reducing rising suicide and overdose rates in the United States. SHIELD harmonizes data from 29 existing prevention trials and studies—including 42,509 participants—to explore the impact of interventions on suicidal thoughts and behaviors and related outcomes. By virtue of its size and scope, the study will also extend the usefulness of existing prevention trials that, on their own, are not large enough to identify impacts on rarer outcomes, such as suicide and overdose. The combined dataset from this agreement will help researchers to identify the mechanisms of action and explore who benefits and under what conditions.

Several of SDRG’s groundbreaking studies are included: the Seattle Social Development Project, Raising Healthy Children, and the Community Youth Development Study. The PROSPER study, which uses our Social Development Model, is included as well. The combined data set includes geographically diverse areas, historically minoritized race and ethnic groups, sexual and gender minorities, and individuals from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This allows for considerable depth of analysis that should contribute a great deal to what we know about preventing suicide.