Crisis Care

Project Overview

Crisis Care is a smartphone-based intervention developed specifically for suicidal adolescents and their caregivers. The mobile app connects adolescents with resources, personalized content, and clinically proven strategies to help cope during moments of crisis. Crisis Care is highly customizable so that users are interacting with relevant content they’ve curated.

The adolescent app connects the user with emergency services and their family during a suicidal crisis and provides access to clinician-selected cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT) and user-curated content proven to comfort and calm. The caregiver app provides supportive resources to coach adolescents, educational content to promote a safe environment and strategies for effective communication. Lastly, the provider dashboard allows for in-clinic user creation and provisioning, customization of content based on a clinical encounter and user management and statistics.

Healthcare Context

The weeks following discharge from an ED or inpatient psychiatric unit represent an especially critical period for suicide prevention. Despite knowledge about elevated post discharge rates of death by suicide, suicide attempts, and readmissions, interventions cannot always match the proportionate need. In the inpatient setting, a large number of patients are discharged without appropriate resources or coping strategies to successfully confront moments of psychological crisis.

The Crisis Care app can save lives by providing immediate and individualized help to suicidal adolescents and improving the caregivers’ ability to support their child during the crisis. Crisis Care has the potential to impact adolescent suicide using clinically validated methods.

• Crisis Care: A unique suicide prevention app