Adaptive Intervention for Adolescents Following Inpatient Psychiatric Care

The MI-enhanced safety plan (MI-SP) component is delivered during hospitalization and includes an individual and family meetings. The goal of the individual meeting with the adolescent is to develop an individualized safety plan for use during a suicidal crisis. This "best practices" approach of safety planning is augmented with Motivational Interviewing (MI) as a core strategy to explicitly elicit adolescents' motivation and commitment to behavior change (i.e. use safety plan; adaptive coping), address barriers or ambivalence, and strengthen self-efficacy. The focus of the family meeting, which is similarly guided by MI, is to prepare parents/guardians, with input from the adolescent, for how they may support the adolescent in implementing the individualized safety plan after discharge and on strengthening parents' commitment and self-efficacy

For participants randomized to receive supportive text messages (Texts), text messages will be sent daily for 4 weeks. The messages will be tailored to encourage use of individualized coping strategies identified as part of safety planning at hospitalization and will include additional adaptive coping tools and resources. The text message content and tone will be consistent with principles of MI.

Adolescent participants will complete daily surveys for 4 weeks (including assessment of suicidal ideation, behavior, and other relevant risk and protective factors) and these will be monitored daily to identify presence of heightened suicidal ideation and presence of suicidal behavior. In addition, daily surveys will be used to determine if adolescents are sufficient responders to Phase 1 intervention.

This will be part of Phase 2. The portal follow-up will similarly address content offered in the booster call. For the adolescent, the focus will be on revisiting and adjusting the safety plan, addressing barriers to safety plan adherence, as well as enhancing motivation and self-efficacy to use healthy coping. For the parent, portal communication will focus on revisiting safety recommendations provided as part of MI-SP, addressing barriers in implementing safety recommendations and in supporting the adolescent's safety plan use, as well as enhancing parents' motivation and self-efficacy in these areas. The portal will enable additional asynchronous contacts up to 3 weeks to provide added support and problem solving, based on identified barriers and concerns, to promote post-discharge behavior change. Counselors will initiate approximately 6 contacts with adolescents and, separately, with parents over 3 weeks as soon as non-response is detected.

The focus of the post-discharge booster phone call with adolescent and with parent, each conducted separately, is to further adjust the safety plan to better meet post-discharge needs, to further enhance adolescents' motivation and commitment to use coping strategies, and to further support adolescents' and parents' self-efficacy to manage suicidal crises.