Prevention of youth suicide focus of Oct. 24 Kopriva lecture

MSU NEWS SERVICE

BOZEMAN – Dr. Matthew Byerly, director of the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery at Montana State University, will present “Preventing Youth Suicide: Evidence About What Works,” at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 24. The lecture, in the Hager Auditorium at the Museum of the Rockies, is free and open to the public with a reception to follow.

Dr. Matthew Byerly, director of MSU’s Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery, will present “Preventing Youth Suicide: Evidence About What Works,” as part of the Kopriva Science Seminar Series. PHOTO COURTESY OF MSU NEWS SERVICE

Byerly will describe available youth suicide prevention interventions, highlighting the differences in program approaches and comparing and contrasting the effectiveness of individual programs. He will also discuss the use of a promising new intervention, Youth Aware of Mental Health, by MSU’s Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery.

He will conclude with recommendations regarding needs for future research in the field, with an emphasis on relevance for Montana and similar rural settings.

Byerly is a professor in MSU’s Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience and has served as the director of the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery since August 2015. Prior to coming to MSU, he was a faculty member of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas for 18 years, where he was a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, directing the schizophrenia research and adult fragile X syndrome research programs.

Byerly received his medical degree from the University of Arizona and completed an adult psychiatry residency and schizophrenia research fellowship at the University of Florida. He has served on multiple expert panels related to antipsychotic treatments and medication adherence in schizophrenia, and served as a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee.

Much of Byerly’s research effort has focused on effectiveness studies in mental health. In recent years, he has also been involved in translational research in neurodevelopmental disorders, including serving as co-principal investigator of a clinical/translational component of a National Institutes of Health-funded Fragile X Syndrome Center grant.

His research efforts now focus on issues of high mental health relevance for Montana. These include suicide prevention; addressing mental health needs of rural and frontier settings; the mental health needs of Native Americans and military veterans; and methods to improve the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.

Byerly’s lecture is presented by the Kopriva Science Seminar Series, which is funded through an endowment created by Phil Kopriva, a 1957 microbiology graduate from MSU. Kopriva also created an endowment to fund the Kopriva Graduate Fellowship Program, which provides support and opportunities for graduate students in the College of Letters and Science, particularly in the biomedical sciences.

The series features four to six seminars annually, with talks provided by MSU graduate students, faculty members and guest speakers.

For more information about this and other Kopriva lectures, visit montana.edu/lettersandscience/kopriva or call (406) 994-4288.