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The present study aims to see if type of custody (pre-booking, jail, prison, private facility), number of days in custody and the nature of crime (violent vs. nonviolent) are predictive of suicide risk versus natural death for women in custody in Texas. The data contains 456 decedents who died while in custody in Texas from 2005 to 2021 and was collected from the Texas Justice Initiative on January 27, 2021. We hypothesize that violent offenders will be more likely to die by suicide during pre-booking (less than 1 day) and prison custody stages and non-violent offenders during early stages of custody such as in jails and within the first 30 days of custody.

The 911 emergency call system fulfills a unique and under-researched role in preventing suicide and is universally available to all citizens suffering a mental health crisis, regardless of socioeconomic, ethnic, or racial differences. Crisis lines and primary doctors frequently contacted for acute suicidality may lack any other recourse beyond calling 911 if a safety plan is not agreed upon or the individual is in immediate danger of harming themself. When these calls enter the 911 emergency system, the Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) operators classify acute suicidal calls as mental health, suicidal, or welfare calls; and up to 20% of all emergency police calls involve people with a mental disorder (Bird & Shemilt, 2019). This study aims to explore whether the highest percentages of mental health-related 911 crisis calls originate from neighborhoods traditionally identified as underserved and having unmet mental health needs. Mental health disorders afflict more than 50% people at some point in their lives in middle and high income-countries (Trautman et al., 2016), yet only about 35.4% of all people with a mental disorder seek help (Wang, 2007). Within that minority of individuals seeking help, there are disparities between different socioeconomic, race, and ethnic groups’ ability to access regular mental health treatment (Bailey et al., 2018). Specifically, over 80% of racial/ethnic minority adults with mental health disorders have been found to have unmet needs (Giyeon et al., 2017). Specifically, in the Western United States, Latinx and Asians had higher odds of unmet mental health needs than non-Hispanic Whites. Separate studies have also found racial inequity between the mental health assessment and treatment options offered for non-Hispanic Whites versus minorities after a suicidal crisis (Charron et al., 2019). One previous study analyzed the racial and ethnic composition of San Francisco neighborhoods contrasted against over 1.3 million mental health-related 911 calls to identify whether disparities were reflected in the use of the 911 system and found a negative relationship for Black residents and rate of mental health related calls (Kessel et al., 2009). There are few other studies exploring ethnic, race or economic disparities and use of the 911 system for mental health or suicide crisis. To this end, the primary aim of our current study is to explore whether mental health crisis 911 calls are associated with lower socioeconomic neighborhoods and underserved race and ethnic groups. This study will use R to conduct spatial autocorrelation and spatial lag regressions to determine if an increase in mental health-related 911 calls are associated with neighborhoods more likely to be underserved by other mental health services. We first contacted the 12 King County primary PSAPs that answer 911 calls and arrange crisis care among law enforcement and fire departments for crisis response in the greater Seattle-area. Ten of the 12 PSAPs were able to provide 18-months of computer-automated database (CAD) logs of their calls presenting as mental health or suicide-related crisis and the call's date and location. The calls will be able to be geographically centered at the neighborhood, precinct, or city level. Over 1 million calls were culled to narrow down to over 7,000 suicide crisis calls. The calls will be contrasted against the U.S. Census Bureau demographic data, such as ethnic composition, homeownership, median house value, education levels, and average gross income, available online for each of the US census tracts within King County. In past studies, geographically weighted regressions have been able to identify relationships between income inequality and suicide, implicating that suicide rates may be negatively associated with social welfare spending and other economic indicators (Tran & Morrison, 2020). Additional descriptive statistics, correlations, and exploratory binomial regression tests will complement the primary analysis to determine any other trends in the use of the 911 emergency system. We hypothesize that 911 may be used more by underserved populations (i.e. those relying on public health insurance) for mental health care crises, and information regarding its usage may provide insights into the development and optimization of suicide prevention infrastructure and programs. If the analysis supports the aforementioned hypothesis, then the Seattle-area and other large urban community mental health communities could use the results from this study to estimate mobile services and mental health crisis support needed for mental health and community policing integration efforts with area law enforcement. To that end, if our hypothesis is indeed supported, it would benefit future research to conduct a concentrated study of those neighborhoods for their mental health needs. If our hypothesis is not supported and underserved groups are not associated with an increase in calls, additionally research exploring a confounding variable (i.e., stigma or fears related to contacting 911, mental health or law enforcement) should be considered.

The purpose of this research is to help assess the ecological validity of the Sub-Types of Antisocial Behavior (STAB) questionnaire (Burt and Donnellan, 2009). Our laboratory has previously shown that the STAB (specifically, the social aggression sub-score) is associated with reduced empathic sensitivity in a laboratory-based task (O’Connell et al., under review), while other groups have linked heightened STAB scores to reduced ambiguity aversion (Buckholtz et al., 2017). We expect this measure will map onto real-world behavioral responses during the COVID-19 pandemic—that is, individuals reporting increased antisocial behaviors will report reduced engagement in social distancing.

The present study measures social discounting behavior and political beliefs proximal to the United States presidential elections in 2016 and 2020. In addition to assessing participants’ social discounting behavior, this research also measures how participants perceive members of the same and opposite political ideology will behave. Therefore, we will test whether perceptions of the opposing ideology are in line with actual behavior from members of that ideology, or whether participants overestimate differences along party/ideological lines.

A complete version of the Emotionally Evocative Statements Task as well as supplementary tables and figures