Review of the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training Program ...

Executive Summary
The Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training program (ASIST) is a fourteen hour workshop that teaches
participants to connect, understand, and assist persons who may be at risk for suicide. Almost one million
persons in twenty-two countries have been ASIST trained since its development in Calgary, Alberta,
Canada in the early 1980s.
Since its development, numerous formal and informal evaluations of ASIST have been conducted. The
purpose of this report is to summarize the results of these evaluations. Evaluations summarized in this
report came from five countries: Australia, Canada, Norway, Scotland, and the United States.
Evaluation results were extracted and organized into five domains: participant satisfaction, knowledge and
attitude changes, acquired skills, intervention-related behavior changes, and suicidal behavior. This review
found that
1. ASIST trainees have generally been very satisfied with the training.
2. ASIST trainees have demonstrated greater relevant knowledge and positive attitudes when
compared to pre-training states or non-trainees.
3. ASIST trainees have demonstrated increased intervention skills, either through self-assessments
or as assessed through simulations, when compared to pre-training states or non-trainees.
4. ASIST trainees have generally reported increased interventions with those possibly at risk for
suicide, when compared to pre-training states or non-trainees; increases, however, have not been
seen in all settings.
5. In a single evaluation, ASIST-trained school personnel reported fewer known suicide attempts
when compared to schools that received other types of training, but caution is warranted when
interpreting this result.
6. The use of ASIST training is dependent upon several factors outside the influence of the
training. Most notable of these factors is the opportunity to engage those who are at risk for suicide.
While it is clear that the ASIST program is popular among participants and routinely results in positive
changes to knowledge, attitudes, skills, and in most instances, intervention behavior, its impact upon
suicidal behavior has not been adequately evaluated. To do this would require a study population of tens
if not hundreds of thousands of persons with a correspondingly large number of ASIST trained persons.
A simpler approach may be to focus on better identifying and measuring the skills acquired as a result of
ASIST. Skill acquisition is the hallmark of most training, and further validation of ASIST in this regard would
be useful.
4 Review of the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training Program (ASIST) LivingWorks Education