Portland State professor of public health Mark Kaplan will be the chief investigator of a new study researching the connection between acute alcohol use and suicide. The project will be funded by a $953,459 grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, an institute within the National Institutes of Health.
The three-year study will compare levels of alcohol found in persons who committed suicide to levels of those in the living population in order to ascertain if alcohol consumption was a determining factor of an individual’s decision to take their own life.
Kaplan explained that this study will diverge from previous suicide research in that he will not be studying suicides committed by chronic alcohol abusers, but only those of individuals who consumed alcohol shortly before their deaths.
The research team will also be looking for a connection between a community’s availability of alcohol and that same community’s rate of alcohol-related suicide.
According to Kaplan, the majority of the grant money will be used to assemble a stellar research team. The team will be multidisciplinary, including statisticians, a forensic pathologist, a lead alcohol researcher and a psychiatrist. The project will be a collaboration between PSU, OHSU and researchers in Texas, New Mexico and Canada.
Kaplan said that attaining this large grant was no easy feat; grants from the NIH are among the most competitive in the nation and require the highest standards of academic excellence. These factors make this study a source of honor not just for Kaplan and his research team, but for PSU as a whole.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2009 (the most recent data available) that more than 36,000 people committed suicide in the United States in 2008, making it the tenth leading cause of death. Those numbers are up from the statistics published by the CDC in the year previous.
“[Suicide] is an important public health issue in this country, just like obesity, HIV/AIDS or cancer,” Kaplansaid. Furthermore, of the more than 30,000 suicides committed each year, 30 percent are alcohol related.
“Violent deaths and alcohol go hand-in-hand in this country,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan stated that researchers will utilize data collected by the CDC’s federally funded National Violent Death Registry System. According to the CDC, NVDRS is an anonymous database that collects information about violent deaths from a number of different sources—police, hospital and coroner reports—in order to better understand the circumstances leading up to a specific incident. NVDRS holds violent death data from 18 different states, of which Oregon is a participant.
In Kaplan’s mind, the goal of the research is quite simple: to prevent suicide.
“[The research is] very practical. It’s about saving lives,” Kaplan said. “This study has real consequences.”
This grant couldn’t have come at a more relevant time in Oregon’s history. The state has the ninth highest rate of suicide in the entire country, and the number of attempted suicides this year has nearly doubled from last year, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
According to Leslie Storm, clinical director for Oregon Partnership’s Crisis Line Program, suicide-related calls to the hotline increased 94 percent between 2008 and 2010. Storm attributed the rise in calls to the plummeting American economy as well as the returns and deployments of military personnel.
Due to Portland’s recent spike in suicides and suicide attempts, Storm said that Portland city officials are realizing that more resources need to be dedicated toward suicide prevention.
She claimed that both the Portland Police and Fire Departments approached Oregon Partnership to train their crisis negotiating teams—those who respond to suicide-related emergency calls—on how to more effectively approach individuals considering suicide.
Storm has worked for the Crisis Line for five years and said that in her experience, without a doubt, alcohol and/or drug use are prevalent in those considering suicide.
Storm said that Portland could work on furthering peoples’ awareness of the suicide issue. Both Kaplan and Storm commented that suicide has an incredibly strong social stigma that may prevent people who are considering suicide from seeking the help they need.
The most important message to spread about suicide, Storm said, is that it’s completely preventable.