Preventing Suicide: A psychological autopsy study of the last contact with a health professional before suicide. In Australia, 48% of all suicides in 2000 were by 35-64 year olds; an additional 13% were by 65 years and over. This study will examine the last clinical contact older suicide victims had with health professionals in order to determine whether this contact offers an opportunity for intervention. For the first time in Australia, GP's, health professionals, and the deceased's next-of-ki ....Preventing Suicide: A psychological autopsy study of the last contact with a health professional before suicide. In Australia, 48% of all suicides in 2000 were by 35-64 year olds; an additional 13% were by 65 years and over. This study will examine the last clinical contact older suicide victims had with health professionals in order to determine whether this contact offers an opportunity for intervention. For the first time in Australia, GP's, health professionals, and the deceased's next-of-kin will be interviewed to determine the context surrounding the deceased's death, and the abilities of health professionals to identify warning signs and to intervene prior to suicide. Given our ageing population, the outcomes will be significant in educating all health professionals to identify suicidal signs, and to prevent premature death in the elderly.Read moreRead less
Normal and abnormal processes of social attention orienting. Human beings are capable of rapidly detecting the direction of another person's eye-gaze and shifting attention reflexively in that direction. This project will compare shifts of attention to non-social and social cues of direction to determine whether attentional shifts to gaze-direction are fast because humans are biologically hard-wired to respond to social cues of evolutionary significance (eyes) or because humans are well-practice ....Normal and abnormal processes of social attention orienting. Human beings are capable of rapidly detecting the direction of another person's eye-gaze and shifting attention reflexively in that direction. This project will compare shifts of attention to non-social and social cues of direction to determine whether attentional shifts to gaze-direction are fast because humans are biologically hard-wired to respond to social cues of evolutionary significance (eyes) or because humans are well-practiced at using a number of different signals for direction in their environment. Findings from this work will than be used to investigate whether a selective impairment of responding to gaze-direction contributes to the social impairments so characteristic of people with schizophrenia.
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