Predicting military and veteran suicide risk: Cultural aspects

This paper describes the three phases of the Durkheim Project. For this project we developed a clinician's dashboard that displays output of models predicting suicide risk of veterans and active duty military personnel. During phase one, we built the clinician’s dashboard and completed a Veterans Affairs (VA) predictive risk medical records study, based on an analysis of the narrative, or free text, portions of VA medical records, In phase two, we will predict suicide risk based on opt-in social media postings by patients using social media websites, e.g., Facebook. We describe the software infrastructure that we have completed for this phase two system. During phase three we will provide a three layer intervention strategy. We discuss our methodology for the three phases, including IRBapproved protocols for the first two phases and a soon-to-be approved IRB protocol for phase three.