Abstract for: Surfacing System Perspectives to Guide Action and Improve Collaboration in Comprehensive Community-based Suicide Prevention

Injurious deaths due to suicide are markedly on the rise across all age categories across the U.S. Multi-system stakeholder task forces now exist to combat deaths, yet complexity is expected as multiple community systems and features can affect suicide rates. Understanding these complexities is critical if broadly effective community efforts are to be built. Working as partners in the Colorado National Collaborative of the State of Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment's Office of Suicide Prevention, we collaboratively initiated a participatory research effort focused on the reduction of suicide death rates that have risen at county and state levels during this millennium. We discuss feasibility and acceptability of assembling concept models through online (video-conferencing based) group model building methods. We describe the resulting causal loop diagram and concept models for simulation as our leading foundations for further broad-based community learning in reducing suicide at local community levels in the U.S.