Proposing an Individual-in-Contexts Model for Reimagining Suicide Screening, Assessment, and Intervention in Black Communities

Suicidality affects millions of people in the United States every year. Despite its pervasiveness, suicidality often impacts minoritized communities disproportionately. For example, Black communities, with historically low suicidality rates, have experienced significant increases in deaths by suicide in the last two decades. Such increases have occurred in unique and complex individual and contextual relationships such as historical trauma, racialized ecological injustices, structural and institutional racism, resource-deprived communities, forced family separation through over-incarceration, interpersonal discrimination, and internalized shame. While traditional psychiatric, psychological, and public health approaches have undoubtedly prevented some suicides, these fields of study often overlook or obscure the interconnections between upstream, oppressive systemic dynamics and downstream, individual-level factors that uniquely contribute to suicidality in Black communities. To address these oversights and limitations, and to re-imagine human services professionals’ suicide screening, assessment, and intervention with Black communities, The Individual-in-Contexts Model (ICM) is offered. This model integrates critical, ecological, contextual, and Black feminist scholarship frameworks, and provides rationale for specific human services research, practice, and policy recommendations.