Establishing an international consortium to developing interventions, initially for parents of children with suicidality and/or self-harm in low-middle income countries

This project focuses on helping parents support children and young people (CYP) who self-harm or experience suicidal thoughts. We focus on Brazil, Rwanda, and Malaysia, where this problem is increasing, but resources are limited. Most research and interventions so far have taken place in high-income, “Western” countries, leaving a gap in knowledge about how best to help families in low-income settings, which we seek to address. Our overall objective is to develop interventions for these parents, simultaneously across the three settings, based on a shared blue-print, with locally relevant variations. This exciting approach will allow efficient shared learning. The network activities develop the methodological and foundational work. We will bring together experts and stakeholders in each setting to understand locally experienced needs, existing resources, ideas for intervention, and barriers to intervention implementation, informed by interviews with key-informant health-care professionals and establishment of Parent and Young Person Advisory Groups. Supported by our ongoing literature review, an international meeting will include skill-sharing between and building, and development of the blue-print, and a research plan to develop and evaluate interventions from that blue-print, but tailored to local settings. Our proposed work is unique in focus on parents and methodology of shared learning during intervention development across settings. The skills building and stakeholder connections will lay foundations for work on other mental health challenges. Whilst we focus on issues around self-harm and suicidality, our approach and learning can be generalised to other areas of young people’s mental health.