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Suicide prevention efforts have focused primarily on screening, education, and brief interventions rather than on treatment of underlying vulnerabilities. The Psychiatry High Risk Program (PHRP) is a specialized outpatient program for suicidal youths and young adults that facilitates transitions in care and provides comprehensive treatment aimed at healing and recovery. The authors evaluated the program's impact on inpatient utilization and suicide risk for patients (N=32) who were referred to the PHRP after psychiatric hospitalization for suicidality. Results indicate that program participants had large reductions in depression and suicidal ideation over 180 days postdischarge; they also had significantly fewer rehospitalizations than did a matched historical cohort, with an average savings of >6 hospital days per patient. These preliminary results suggest that a recovery-based suicide prevention program can be feasible and sustainable and may be cost-effective in a value-based system of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: A novel brief intervention was used to investigate how empathic support and expectation can induce changes in mood, anxiety, and perceived stress. Method: Seventy-six undergraduates with high negative affect were assigned to three conditions of a program involving tasks with no known therapeutic benefit. In Group 1: Expectation Only, participants were given a deceptive description of the benefits of the program to quantify the magnitude of symptom change due to expectation alone. In Group 2: Empathic Support + Expectation, participants were also instructed to write about past and current sources of distress and provided with supportive notes each week to quantify the role of empathic support plus expectation. In Group 3: Control, participants were told they were "norming" the instruments. Results: Participants in Groups 1 and 2 demonstrated decreases in depression, anxiety, and rumination, with significant medium effect reductions found in the empathic support plus expectation condition. Conclusions: Evidence suggests that empathic support and expectation cause reduction of symptoms spanning depression and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although evidence suggests that the benefits of psychodynamic treatments are sustained over time, presently it is unclear whether these sustained benefits are superior to non-psychodynamic treatments. Additionally, the extant literature comparing the sustained benefits of psychodynamic treatments compared to alternative treatments is limited with methodological shortcomings. The purpose of the current study was to conduct a rigorous test of the growth of the benefits of psychodynamic treatments relative to alternative treatments across distinct domains of change (i.e., all outcome measures, targeted outcome measures, non-targeted outcome measures, and personality outcome measures). To do so, the study employed strict inclusion criteria to identify randomized clinical trials that directly compared at least one bona fide psychodynamic treatment and one bona fide non-psychodynamic treatment. Hierarchical linear modeling (Raudenbush, Bryk, Cheong, Congdon, & du Toit, 2011) was used to longitudinally model the impact of psychodynamic treatments compared to non-psychodynamic treatments at post-treatment and to compare the growth (i.e., slope) of effects beyond treatment completion. Findings from the present meta-analysis indicated that psychodynamic treatments and non-psychodynamic treatments were equally efficacious at post-treatment and at follow-up for combined outcomes ( k = 20), targeted outcomes ( k = 19), non-targeted outcomes ( k = 17), and personality outcomes ( k = 6). Clinical implications, directions for future research, and limitations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]