Mass media campaign material designed to prevent youth suicide: A randomised controlled trial

Aims This study aims to build the evidence base for an effective public education campaign which raises community awareness of suicide and encourages help-seeking behaviour among vulnerable young people, without running the risk of causing distress or other forms of harm. Research questions This study aims to address two research questions 1) Do certain media messages have positive effects (e.g., improving knowledge about risk factors and warning signs, encouraging help-seeking) 2) Do certain media messages have negative effects (e.g., perpetuating myths about suicide, triggering suicidal thoughts This study takes the form of a four-arm randomised controlled trial (three active suicide prevention intervention Community Service Announcements (CSAs) and one control group- an emergency contraception CSA) with three measurement occasions (pre-viewing, post-viewing, four -week follow-up). We will recruit 240 young people (aged 18-24). Recruitment will occur via a range of approaches including advertisements on noticeboards and websites. The young people who agree to participate will be randomly allocated to one of four conditions – viewing one of the three CSAs on suicide prevention or viewing the control emergency contraception CSA. Each CSA was 30 seconds long and featured the same young people but had a different message. CSA 1: featured young people doing things to improve their mood and suicidal thinking. The main message was find what works for you. CSA2: featured young people discussing the importance of talking and concludes "talk to someone".CSA3 fetures young people overcoming suicidal thoughts and concludes that life gets better". The control CSA is about emergency contraception and lets young people know that the can access it at a pharmacy. All viewing of CSAs was conducted undersupervsion and participant had to mark that the they viewed the CSA before the Time 2 survey was made available to them to complete. CSA viewing Each participant will view his or her allocated CSA on an individual ipad or laptop with headphones in a quiet room at their own health service. Data collection Data collection will occur at three time points (T1 pre-viewing, T2 immediately post-viewing &T3 1 month post viewing). Randomisation Upon consenting to participate in the study, participants are randomised at the individual level using computer generated randomisation. This gives each potential participant an equal chance of being assigned to watch each of the four CSAs. At the time of randomization researcher are unaware of which CSA participants will be randomly assigned to watch.