The collaborative assessment and management of suicidality (CAMS) versus enhanced care as usual (E-CAU) with suicidal soldiers: Moderator analyses from a randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACTGiven historically high rates of suicide among military personnel over the past decade the present study analyzed whether key demographic, military, and research-based variables moderated clinical treatment outcomes of 148 suicidal active duty U.S. Army soldiers. This is a secondary analysis of data from a randomized controlled trial comparing the collaborative assessment and management of suicidality (CAMS) to enhanced care as usual (E-CAU; Jobes et al., 2017). Nine potential moderator variables were derived from the suicidology literature, military-specific considerations, and previous CAMS research; these were sex, age, marital status, race, lifetime suicide attempts, combat deployments, time in service, initial distress, and borderline personality disorder diagnosis. The clinical outcomes included six suicide- and mental health-related variables. Six of the eight significant moderator findings in this study showed CAMS outperforming E-CAU in certain subgroups with medium to large effect sizes ...