In recent years, suicidal behaviors have shown substantial increase worldwide. This trend is also prominent in Israel and has led to a dramatic increase in mental health treatment demand resulting in long wait times and low treatment acceptance rate. To address the critical need in crisis intervention for children and adolescents at suicidal risk we developed an ultra-brief acute crisis intervention, based on Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT). IPT is an evidence-based intervention for various psychopathologies among different age groups. The current adaptation of IPT-A is comprised of five weekly sessions, followed by monthly follow-up caring email contacts to the patients and their parents, over a period of 3 months. This paper aims to review the theoretical foundation of this intervention, describe the research design, and present preliminary results of a pilot study. Preliminary Results from our samples of 26 adolescents indicate meaningful trends for both the suicidal ideation (SIQ) and depression (MFQ) outcome measures. Significant interaction was found concerning suicidal ideation but not for depression. Main limitations include small sample size and stratified controls. The treatment appears to be safe, feasible and acceptable and initial results show promising trends to support further study of the approach.

Suicidal behaviors in adolescence are a major public health concern. The dramatic rise in self-injurious behaviors among adolescents has led to an overwhelming increase in the number of those presenting to the emergency rooms. The intervention described below was constructed on the basis of brief and focused interventions that were found to be effective among suicidal adults using an adaptation of interpersonal psychotherapy for adolescents. The intervention has four main objectives: first, a focused treatment for reducing suicide risk; second, a short and immediate response; third, building a treatment plan based on understanding the emotional distress and interpersonal aspects underlying suicidal behavior; and lastly, to generate hope among adolescents and their parents. The intervention includes intensive five weekly sessions, followed by 3 mo of email follow-up.

Background and Goals: Suicide attempts occur mostly during adolescence and are much more frequent in females than in males, although males tend to commit suicide more often than females. This study aims to examine the association between female gender, gender conflict, depression, stress and suicide attempts in adolescent girls. Methods: Participants included 86 adolescent girls aged 12-21 (µ=15.7, SD=3.07) with depression (n=29), attempted suicide (n=15) or both (n=42), admitted consecutively to a tertiary medical center and 93 healthy controls from the community. Depression, suicidal ideation and behavior, gender identity and conflict, personality factors, and stress were compared between the study group and controls and each of the three study-subgroups and controls. Results : A difference was found in the perception gap of own femininity versus others' expectations of the subject’s femininity, between the suicide attempters both with and without depression and the controls. Personality factors were also found to be related to depression and suicide attempts. Suicide attempters with depression showed more harm avoidance than those without depression. Novelty seeking was significantly higher in non-depressed suicide attempters than in controls but not when compared to suicide attempters with depression. Conclusion: It seems that suicide attempts and depression may not only be related to female gender identity. Conflicting gender expectations may result in increased stress, raising the risk for suicide attempts, particularly in girls with high harm avoidance.