One in five US adults who attempts suicide has spent at least one night in jail in the year prior. With more than 10 million admissions per year and many stays of just a few days, jails touch a significant number of people at high risk for suicide who are not well connected with other support services.

This led psychologists to ask: What if trained professionals intervened while people were detained to decrease suicide risk once they got out?

With funding from federal grants, researchers from Brown and Michigan State University tested a safety planning intervention that involved an in-jail program and telephone check-ins after people got out. According to a study published in JAMA Network Open, the trial reduced suicide attempts by 55 percent.

Public discourse tends to focus on preventing suicides in jail, not before or after detention, says Lauren Weinstock, PhD, a clinical psychologist who led the Rhode Island arm of the project.

“We chose to focus on the period surrounding jail detention, including those first six months after return to the community, as a critical point of intervention for people who are at risk for suicide, and also one that had been largely ignored in the scientific literature,” says Weinstock, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown.

The research team recruited participants from the Rhode Island Department of Corrections and a jail in Michigan. Trained therapists met with them while they were in jail for a single safety planning session focused on strategies they could use to keep themselves safe both in jail and after release. After participants returned to the community, the therapists followed up with regular phone calls for six months.

According to the study, in the year after jail detention, the intervention reduced suicide attempts by more than half, and suicide events (including suicidal behaviors and suicide-related hospitalizations) by 42 percent, compared to the enhanced standard care people leaving jail typically receive.

Weinstock says that the next challenge is encouraging correctional and community mental health systems to adopt the intervention on a wider scale. “The goal is to provide these systems with the most important data they need to move towards change in their routine practices, in a larger effort to save lives,” she says.