Ilana Gratch

Teachers College · Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology

Background Researchers and clinicians have typically relied on retrospective reports to monitor suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Smartphone technology has made real‐time monitoring of suicidal thoughts possible via mobile ecological momentary assessment (EMA). However, little is known about how information gleaned from EMA compares with that obtain...

Objective: The present study sought to evaluate the psychometric properties and inter-informant agreement of the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Interview-Revised (SITBI-R) in adolescents and their parents. Method: Suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents from the community (N = 206), ages 12–19 years, were administered the SITBI-R during a lab v...

Background While suicide-specific psychosocial interventions often teach coping skills to suicidal individuals, little is known about the strategies that individuals intuitively use on their own to cope with suicidal ideation in everyday life. Aims The present study used Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) to examine the effectiveness of specifi...

With more than 12 million emergency department visits annually related to substance abuse and mental health crises, and approximately 650,000 patients evaluated for suicide attempts, the ED is a critical clinical setting for intervention. This review presents an ED-focused approach to assessing depression and suicide risk, including background info...

Background Suicide plans (SP) can be a common precipitant to suicidal behavior (SB) during adolescence, and SPs can vary in how specific they are, how frequently they are thought about, and how strongly they are intended to be enacted. To date, we have limited understanding of how discrete SP characteristics (i.e., specificity, frequency, and inten...

Both the quality and utility of youth suicide research depend on how we assess our outcomes of interest: suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). We now have access to more STB assessments than ever before, with measures for youth that vary in what exact experiences are asked about, how such measures elicit information, when and how frequently measu...

Several barriers exist to routine assessment of suicidal ideation (SI) in adolescents across settings, including insufficient time, tools, and training. Such barriers often result in the use of brief or even single-item assessments of SI, which may result in misclassification. The present study sought to compare single- and multi-item assessment of...

Introduction: Adolescents and their parents do not always see eye to eye. This principle applies to multi-informant reports of adolescents' self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Although prior work has revealed the presence of parent-adolescent discrepant reports, we have little insight into exactly who is most likely to display such discrepancie...

Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) is an outpatient, cognitive behavioural treatment shown to reduce self-injury and suicidal behaviour in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). In this chapter, we review the basic principles of the DBT approach to the treatment of suicidal individuals, and the status of DBT treatment and research...

Objective To examine factors differentiating individuals whose first suicide attempt was during childhood (ages 5–12 yrs) from those who first attempted suicide during adolescence (13–19 yrs) and during adulthood (≥20 yrs). Method A sample of 418 participants (ages 18–64 yrs) with a mood disorder and ≥1 lifetime suicide attempt was divided into th...

Objective: Suicidal individuals are a heterogeneous population and may differ in systematic ways in their responsiveness to stress. The primary aim of the present study was to identify whether a different pattern of physiological stress response exists among adult suicide attempters with a history of behavioral problems during childhood and adolesc...

We sought to document the correlates of mental health and sexual behaviors of PrEP using and non-using gay, bisexual, and other MSM. Depression, anxiety and internalized homophobia scores were all significantly lower for PrEP users compared to HIV-negative non-PrEP users. PrEP use was found to moderate the relationship between anxiety and condomles...

The House and Ball community is an important cultural manifestation of resiliency for Black and Latino gay and bisexual men and transgender women. Participants at the August, 2013 House of Latex Ball in New York City were surveyed about insurance coverage, health care access, experiences in health care, and housing instability. The sample (n = 367)...

In the context of continued high rates of condomless anal intercourse and HIV-1 infection, young men who have sex with men (YMSM) need additional effective and desirable HIV prevention tools. This study reports on the willingness of a racially-ethnically diverse cohort of YMSM to use a new biomedical prevention approach, a long-acting injectable pr...

Background: In the context of continued high rates of HIV-1 infection, particularly in high-risk populations such as young MSM(YMSM) of color, additional effective and desirable HIV prevention tools are needed. The efficacy of daily oral PrEP has ranged widely across clinical trials due to variable adherence. Long-acting injectable PrEP(LAI-PrEP) c...