About CAPES

The Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide (CAPES) is headquartered at UMass Chan Medical School and comprises a cross-system collaboration between the UMass System and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. CAPES is co-directed by Dr. Edwin Boudreaux and Dr. Catarina Kiefe. CAPES is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health as one of its Practice-Based Suicide Prevention Research Centers (P50MH129701). Our mission is to save lives by accelerating the uptake of evidence-based suicide care. Our multi-disciplinary faculty members draw on the field’s implementation science, person-centered design, hybrid clinical trial design, economics, business development, and ethics to maximize the scientific and public health impact of our Center.

We share an aspirational goal with the Zero Suicide framework of preventing all suicide deaths. This approach is not only to work directly with individuals, but to engage healthcare systems in transformational change of their entire systems approach to identifying and supporting people with suicide risk. CAPES projects use at least one of Zero Suicide framework's four best practice clinical performance elements for how to support people with suicide in healthcare settings: 1) Identify risk among people receiving care, 2)  Engage people who are at risk in appropriate care, including safety planning and lethal means counseling, 3) Treat suicide risk directly in specialty settings, and 4) support transitions in care with communication and support, particularly after acute care visits.

Check out the other Practice Based Suicide Prevention Research Centers, funded by NIMH, on our Resources for Researchers page.