City-Wide Psychiatry Rounds - February 2025
Title: Breaking New Ground in Suicide Studies - What’s On the Horizon for Research and Education
Presenter: Dr. Sakina Rizvi, PhD, MACP, RP
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Dr. Sakina Rizvi, is the Chair of the Arthur Sommer Rotenberg (ASR) Suicide and Depression Studies Program at St. Michael’s Hospital and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on understanding the neurobiology underlying suicide risk and treatment-resistant depression (TRD) through advanced neuroimaging techniques like fMRI and PET. In addition to her neuroimaging work, Dr. Rizvi develops and evaluates novel psychotherapies for suicide prevention, depression, and trauma resilience with the aim of translating these therapies for use in hospital and community settings. She is also deeply engaged in participant-centered research, collaborating with persons with lived experience of suicide risk and national partners to develop effective suicide prevention strategies. Her advocacy extends to mental health education, often using the creative arts to raise awareness. She led the Storybook Project, a lived experience short story collection on the impact of suicide published in September 2021 as “What it Takes to Make it Through: Stories of Suicide Loss and Resilience”.
Learning Objectives:
- Illustrate the importance of integrating long-term mechanistic studies with shorter-term interventional research to advance suicide prevention.
- Examine the clinical relevance of neuroimaging findings that reveal how individuals at risk of suicide process physical pain.
- Evaluate innovations in brief psychotherapies and community-based caregiver training that improve access to care and enhance suicide prevention efforts.
- Identify key challenges clinicians face in managing suicide risk and strategies to improve competency through education and training initiatives.