Hispanic Firearm Suicide Decedents: Identifying Circumstances and Typologies with National Violent Death Reporting System Data

Modified Project Summary/Abstract Section Nearly 1 in 2 Hispanic adult suicide deaths involves a firearm, the most lethal suicide method. However, there are critical gaps in characterizing firearm suicide deaths and identifying opportunities for preventing firearm suicide. Our objectives are to leverage the power of machine learning (ML) to identify circumstances preceding firearm suicides among Hispanic adults and generate new information on Hispanic adult firearm suicide decedents in America. We propose to achieve these objectives by: (1) Developing a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline to identify and code circumstances preceding firearm suicide deaths among Hispanic adults and (2) Establishing clinical typologies of Hispanic adult firearm suicide decedents with combinations of demographic characteristics and circumstances preceding death. This project will ultimately provide critical information that will be used to inform intervention and evaluation opportunities through a future R01, such as implementing lethal means counseling, advising when the intervention could be provided, and, ideally, improving suicide prevention for all Americans in the future. The proposed research is significant for two reasons. First, this project will fill a critical need for identifying key circumstances preceding highly-lethal firearm suicide deaths among Hispanic adults. Second, this project will generate clinical profiles of Hispanic adult firearm suicide decedents. The proposed research is innovative for several reasons. First, this will be among the first studies to leverage free-text data to generate information on the circumstances preceding Hispanic firearm suicides. Second, this will be the first project to leverage the power of NLP and ML with free-text data to predict common circumstances preceding firearm suicide death among Hispanics quickly and accurately while also creating standalone, annotated NLP tools. Third, this will be the first study funded to establish subgroups of Hispanic firearm suicide decedents.