Widening the cracks: Unintended harms of excluding individuals at risk of suicide from broader mental health research

The inclusion of participants at risk of suicide in general mental health intervention research can make balancing participant safety and recruiting a representative sample challenging. On the one hand, excluding  these individuals can preclude researchers from evaluating interventions for those who are most in need (Fisher et al., 2002; Hom et al., 2017). On the other hand, managing suicide risk and providing support to  these participants can be resource intensive and time consuming, requires specialized training for staff, and necessitates ongoing monitoring, which may seem unfeasible for low-cost and/or brief intervention research (Stevens et al., 2021; Ward & Wilks, 2020).