CA25119 - Pathways to Safety: Mapping Parental Self-Harm and Suicide Risk (SAFEPARENTALPATH-SITBs)

Suicide is the leading cause of maternal death in many countries, with self-injurious thoughts and behaviours (SITBs) having huge physical and mental health impacts on parents and their offspring. However, maternal suicide is also preventable. Such prevention could be achieved by more timely detection, referrals, and tailored interventions. SAFEPARENTALPATH-SITBs is specifically designed to address this issue. It will shift from a solely risk-focused perspective to a recovery-oriented approach on this topic, thus reducing stigma and directly supporting international policy goals such as the WHO’s Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2030, the UN Sustainable Goals 3.1 and 3.4, and the EU Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health. The core aim of SAFEPARENTALPATH-SITBs is to create a pan-European inter-disciplinary network including researchers, clinicians and people with lived experience (PWLE) to achieve a real and long-term impact on parental SITBs. It will extend beyond what could be achieved through individual action in any discipline through networking to: a) develop a coordinated research agenda on parental SITBs (WG1); b) connect researchers, clinicians and PWLE from Inclusiveness Target Countries (ITC) and non-ITC working in this field with each other, in order to generate and disseminate scientific evidence about parental SITBs (WG2), to estimate its economic burden (WG3), to describe datasets that can be leveraged to progress research (WG5); and c) co-produce international guidelines (WG2) and scalable interventions transferable across EU healthcare systems (WG4). This effort is very timely given that parental SITBs are increasing across Europe, calling for immediate initiatives to improve outcomes for these families.