Understanding When and Why Some Individuals Attempt Suicide: Testing an Emerging Framework Integrating Menstrual Cycle Fluctuations in Risk
This is an IAPMD Professional Community Webinar and the content is aimed at Health Care Professionals & Researchers. Patients with a special interest are welcome to attend but please note, that the presentation will be clinical in nature and we are not able to answer questions about individual health concerns/circumstances.
This session will present an emerging framework for understanding when individuals may be most likely to experience STB*s and who may be at the highest risk.
We posit that, for some females, STBs are associated with neurobiological sensitivity to hormone changes across the menstrual cycle. Specifically, we hypothesize that exposure to normal hormone flux during the weeks before and during menses (i.e., the perimenstrual weeks) is associated with a rapid co-escalation of negative affect and disruptive social experiences; these hormone-related symptoms may individually or conjointly increase acute STB risk in at-risk individuals.
We outline both an explanation for which individuals may be at especially high risk (i.e., between-subjects factors) and potential mechanisms to explain the association between the perimenstrual phase and females’ increased risk for STBs (i.e., within-subjects factors). Data will be presented from three studies designed to address different tenets of this model, using rigorous methods to advance the extant literature on suicide risk and the menstrual cycle in both adults and adolescents.
*Suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Speaker: Sarah A. Owens, MS is a current Clinical Psychology Resident at Brown University and will complete her postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University in the Pediatric Anxiety Research Center next year. She will receive her doctorate from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where her NIMH-funded dissertation investigated menstrual cycle exacerbation of suicide risk in adolescents.
TICKETS
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The International Association for Premenstrual Disorders Clinical Advisory Board is staffed primarily by scientific experts who volunteer their time.
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