Sharpen® Suicide Screening (1.5 hour)

Sharpen® Suicide Screening

1.5 contact hours · Asynchronous · Continuing education available

Resiliency Technologies, Inc. has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7243. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Resiliency Technologies, Inc. is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

Evidence base

Sharpen® draws on twenty years of prevention work in schools, health systems and communities, reaching 87,792 people through live trainings before any of it became digital. The curriculum was written by practitioners who first certified in the field’s gold-standard models, including CONNECT postvention through the South Carolina Office of Suicide Prevention, and it is structured against the four strategic directions of the 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2024).

The course is led by Alex Karydi, Ph.D., LMFT, CASAC II, Director of State and Territorial Initiatives at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, the only federally supported resource center dedicated to advancing the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, alongside other national experts and researchers.

It teaches the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale, a validated universal screener with versions for many settings and languages (Posner et al., 2011).

This course is the professional training component of VNS Health Safe Pathways, a five-year New York State Office of Mental Health suicide prevention initiative, where it has been delivered to 534 participants across 23 cohorts with more than 200 certifications issued. Among trained providers, confidence in suicide risk management improved significantly (p = .001), the proportion reporting high confidence rose from 48.9% to 72.3%, and the low-confidence group was eliminated entirely. Of participants surveyed, 94.8% called the training a good use of their time and 95.5% would recommend it (Rios & Biber, 2024).

Learning Objectives

• Describe the Columbia Protocol (C-SSRS) as a validated universal screening instrument and identify the settings in which it is indicated
• Demonstrate how to ask directly about suicidal ideation, intent and plan
• Summarize current research on suicide risk factors among the youth and young adult populations you serve
• Identify the threshold at which a screening result requires escalation, and name the crisis response pathways available in your setting
  Resiliency Technologies, Inc. | sharpenminds.com | © 2014-2026. All rights reserved.

Sources

Ahmedani, B. K., Simon, G. E., Stewart, C., Beck, A., Waitzfelder, B. E., Rossom, R., Lynch, F., Owen-Smith, A., Hunkeler, E. M., Whiteside, U., Operskalski, B. H., Coffey, M. J., & Solberg, L. I. (2014). Health care contacts in the year before suicide death. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 29(6), 870-877. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-014-2767-3

Dazzi, T., Gribble, R., Wessely, S., & Fear, N. T. (2014). Does asking about suicide and related behaviours induce suicidal ideation? What is the evidence? Psychological Medicine, 44(16), 3361-3363. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714001299

DeCou, C. R., & Schumann, M. E. (2018). On the iatrogenic risk of assessing suicidality: A meta-analysis. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 48(5), 531-543. https://doi.org/10.1111/sltb.12368

Posner, K., Brown, G. K., Stanley, B., Brent, D. A., Yershova, K. V., Oquendo, M. A., Currier, G. W., Melvin, G. A., Greenhill, L., Shen, S., & Mann, J. J. (2011). The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale: Initial validity and internal consistency findings from three multisite studies with adolescents and adults. American Journal of Psychiatry, 168(12), 1266-1277. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.10111704

The Trevor Project. (2026). 2025 U.S. national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2025/

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2024). 2024 national strategy for suicide prevention.

Resiliency Technologies, Inc. | sharpenminds.com | © 2014-2026. All rights reserved.