Providing Hope: The Dolansky Research and Treatment Program for Suicide Prevention

Suicide is the fourth-leading cause of death among people aged 15-29 and, each year, more than 700,000 people worldwide die by suicide. In Israel alone, over 500 Israelis die from suicide annually.

Tel Aviv University’s Charles, Evelyn and Sandra Dolansky Research and Treatment Program for Suicide Prevention, slated to begin this fall, is an ambitious initiative dedicated to identifying novel treatment targets for intervention, and developing and implementing a new generation of therapeutic approaches to reverse depression and prevent suicide.

Jeffrey Katz, CPA, founder of the Charles, Evelyn and Sandra Dolansky Foundation headquartered in Montreal, shares his personal motivation for focusing on mental health: “The loss experienced from preventable suicides, including the profound impact of tragedies on close acquaintances and the community, has galvanized our commitment to this cause. Our foundation, established in memory of Charles, Evelyn and Sandra Dolansky, is dedicated to uplifting their souls through impactful mental health and education initiatives.”

TAU has the expertise, experience, and resources to ensure the program’s success. Its School of Psychological Sciences is Israel’s leading school in the field and among the top seventy-five worldwide.

The recently established National Center for Traumatic Stress and Resilience brings together 100 mental health and medical researchers from across campus who work in close collaboration with the IDF, the US Department of Defense, the US National Institute of Mental Health, and other organizations worldwide to advance the research, treatment, prevention, and education of PTSD and other anxiety– and depression-related conditions.

TAU’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences runs Israel’s largest biomedical research complex, with 1,400 researcher-clinicians in 19 TAU-affiliated hospitals.

“Suicide is on the rise, and we see suicidality in younger ages than we used to, which is very alarming,” says Prof. Amit Lazarov of the School of Psychological Sciences and academic head of the program. 

Lazarov explains that the primary goal of the TAU program is to take suicidality – the risk of suicide – and related disorders, mainly depression, and focus efforts on preventing and finding new targets for treatment. “What we have now is not enough,” he says. “We want to find underlying mechanisms and develop new treatments to prevent and treat depression and other disorders that lead to suicide.”

Researchers are investigating different methods of treatment based on their areas of expertise. Lazarov,who has been researching visual attention patterns in depression, says that depressed patients tend to be attracted to negative stimuli and negative information, and see positive information in a less positive and more negative fashion. In his research area, one means of intervention might be to try to change these attention allocation and interpretation patterns.

Others, he explains, are working in the area of emotion regulation research. “Depressed people have aberrant emotion regulation strategies,” he says, “and they use the wrong strategies, or they don’t try to regulate their emotions, or they’re drawn to a negative emotion.” Interventions that are being developed are intended to adjust their emotional regulation capacities.

A third direction of research is examining the relationship between ADHD and suicidality, while still another point of view has theorized that sleep deprivation is a driving mechanism for numerous conditions, including suicidality.

“The most interesting thing when we started working on this program,” Lazarov says, “was that each of us talked about their research and what it has to do with suicide and depression.

We found that while we are all researching the same subject, it is from very different angles.” In that sense, he continues, treatment should come from different approaches and should target various aspects of depression and suicidality, thus ensuring that it is tailor-made for individuals and their specific issues.

The first stage in the Research and Treatment Program for Suicide Prevention will focus on adults ages eighteen and up and later progress to suicidal tendencies in children. 

Treatment will begin at Tel Aviv University’s post-traumatic stress disorder clinic, which is being operated by TAU’s National Center for Traumatic Stress and Resilience. Prof. Yair Bar-Haim, head of the center, will administer the clinical section of the suicide prevention program.

Lazarov explains that the combined nature of the program, which will integrate research and treatment, will enable both areas to benefit from each other. “As a researcher and a clinician, you need to listen to your patients. They have a lot to teach you, and you can take that into developing new therapy through research,” he says. “Through research, you can develop new therapies and bring them back to the team.”

SUICIDE IS the fourth leading cause of death among people aged 15-29, with more than 700,000 people dying by suicide annually worldwide.