Suicide study awarded $3.2 million

esearchers at the University's Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide, the nation's leading center for suicide research, will receive $3.2 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research, expand their team, and establish a new venture with counterparts in China, where more than half the suicides among women worldwide occur each year.

A team led by Yeates Conwell, professor of psychiatry, will receive $2 million from the National Institute of Mental Health over the next five years to train researchers who focus on suicide. The training program is the largest in the country devoted to suicide and will support the work of nearly a dozen specialists.

"Suicide is a common and yet unrecognized behavior with tremendous public health significance," says Conwell. "It's difficult to study, because of the stigma often attached to suicide."

While the raw number of completed suicides may seem low--about 75 in Monroe County each year and about 30,000 in the nation--suicide is the third leading cause of death among young adults and the eighth leading cause of death among all people in the United States. "More people die from suicide than by homicide, yet we all understand that homicide is a major assault on our communities," Conwell says.

A second grant recently received by researchers, for $1.2 million, focuses on suicide in China. The China-Rochester Suicide Research Center is headed by Eric Caine, the John Romano Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and will include visits to Rochester by Chinese scholars who study suicide in that country as well as visits by Rochester researchers to China.

"Medicine has really failed to look at suicide as a public health problem," says Caine.

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