MAY 1, 2026
Amanda C. Collins, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
About the Presentation: Suicide is a leading cause of death in adolescents, and adolescents recently discharged from inpatient psychiatric units are at high-risk for suicide. Prior work has found that increased negative affect and depressive symptoms, as well as decreased positive affect, are short-term risk factors for NSSI and SI. However, this prior work has largely utilized time-invariant and group-level approaches, which can overlook the fact that suicide dynamics can vary both between person and within person for a given day.
This talk will present findings from a 28-day ambulatory study with adolescents recently discharged from a psychiatric inpatient unit who completed momentary assessments of affect and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). Further, this talk will highlight potential momentary risk factors for STBs, including how specific affective states may impact STBs in the high-risk period after psychiatric discharge.
About the Presenter: Dr. Amanda Collins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She completed her T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health with Dr. Nick Jacobson, and she received her PhD in clinical psychology from Mississippi State University under the mentorship of E. Samuel Winer. Her research focuses on reward dysfunction as a transdiagnostic mechanism underlying the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. The two areas of her research focus on: (1) the application of advanced statistical methods to predict changes in psychopathology and (2) the development and testing of both in-person and digital interventions. She is particularly interested in bridging these two areas of research by using advanced methods to understand what interventions work best and for whom, with the overall goal of developing more personalized interventions to treat reward dysfunction transdiagnostically.
Dr. Collins utilizes a multimodal approach, including self-reports, experimental paradigms, ecological momentary assessments, and passive sensing, to investigate the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of psychopathology. She also has extensive experience with longitudinal data analysis, including multilevel and time-varying vector autoregressive modeling, mixed-effects modeling, and machine learning to investigate how reward dysfunction changes over time and influences the course, severity, and treatment of psychopathology. Her work has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop and evaluate digital interventions for co-occurring disorders.