International award for suicide researcher

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has awarded its 2008 Research Award to Associate Professor Annette Beautrais from the University of Otago, Christchurch in recognition of her contributions to suicide research. It will be presented at the AFSP's annual fundraising dinner in New York in May.

This is the second international award in two years for Associate Professor Beautrais, who is principal investigator with the Canterbury Suicide Project. In 2006 she received the Edwin Shneidman Award from the American Association of Suicidology.

Her interests since 1991 include: psychological autopsy studies of suicide and medically serious but non-fatal suicide attempts in people of all ages; morbidity and mortality in follow-up studies of people who have made suicide attempts; restricting access to means of suicide; the needs of families bereaved by suicide; the development of a New Zealand suicide assessment and risk monitoring programme for children and adolescents receiving child welfare services, and national suicide prevention strategies. She has also worked on a 1000-person 30-year birth cohort examining developmental aspects of suicidal behaviour in adolescence and young adulthood.

Her current research is focussed on interventions for people who present to Emergency Departments with suicidal ideation or suicidal behaviour, and she is also evaluating the development of a national postvention support initiative for people bereaved by suicide.

She has written a number of research papers and reviews about suicide, and has contributed to the development of a range of guidelines for professional groups about identifying, treating and managing people with suicidal behaviour. She works collaboratively with a number of international suicide research and prevention centres, is a member of the editorial boards of suicide journals and reviewer for a number of other journals.

She is the former vice-president and current general secretary of the International Association for Suicide Prevention, and first co-editor-in-chief of CRISIS, the journal of the International Association for Suicide Prevention.