Editorial: How Can We Best Support Suicidal Youth? New Evidence for Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Different Forms...

Establishing effective treatments for youth at risk of suicide is one of the most pressing and important tasks within child and adolescent psychiatry. Self-harm, which includes suicide attempt (SA), nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), and nonsuicidal self-poisoning, is one of the strongest predictors of suicide.¹ Youth who engage in self-harm or experience mental health crisis are becoming more and more common, at increasingly younger ages, and so confidence in treatments to successfully reduce self-harm and prevent relapse and recurrence is crucial.² However, the evidence base for such treatments is severely lacking despite some progress in the field.^3-5 Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is the most established treatment option, but even so, the evidence comes from just a handful of studies and primarily focuses on the ability of DBT to reduce the repetition of self-harm. Whether DBT is successful in supporting young people along their recovery journey and is equally effective at treating different forms of self-harm are yet to be properly explored.