Person:

Park, Jennifer

Pediatric anxiety disorders have high prevalence rates and morbidity and are associated with considerable functional impairment and distress. They may be predictors for the development of other psychiatric disorders and, without intervention, are more likely to persist into adulthood. While evidence-based pharmacological and behavioral interventions are currently available, there remains a sizable subset of youth who remain only partially treatment-responsive and therefore symptomatic following treatment. Novel methods of treatment, pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic, including acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), attention bias modification (ABM), d-cycloserine (DCS) augmentation of cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT), and glutamatergic agents such as riluzole, are briefly introduced and discussed.

A long-standing challenge for scientific and clinical work on suicidal behavior is that people often are motivated to deny or conceal suicidal thoughts. We proposed that people considering suicide would possess an objectively measurable attentional bias toward suicide-related stimuli, and that this bias would predict future suicidal behavior. Participants were 124 adults presenting to a psychiatric emergency department who were administered a modified emotional Stroop task and followed for six months. Suicide attempters showed an attentional bias toward suicide-related words relative to neutral words, and this bias was strongest among those who had made a more recent attempt. Importantly, this suicide-specific attentional bias predicted which people made a suicide attempt over the next six months, above and beyond other clinical predictors. Attentional bias toward more general negatively-valenced words did not predict any suicide-related outcomes, supporting the specificity of the observed effect. These results suggest that suicide-specific attentional bias can serve as a behavioral marker for suicidal risk, and ultimately improve scientific and clinical work on suicide-related outcomes.