About STAR Center
History
Services for Teens At Risk (STAR) Center is a specialty clinical, training, and research program within the division of Child and Adolescent Services at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH) and the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry.
STAR Center was established when testimony provided by Drs. David Brent, MD and Mary Margaret Kerr, EdD on June 6, 1986 to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Task Force on Teenage Suicide resulted in appropriation from the Commonwealth to the University of Pittsburgh. Funded specifically to address youth suicide, STAR is the first comprehensive youth suicide intervention center in Pennsylvania and one of the first centers of its kind in the nation.
STAR Center provides outpatient assessment and treatment for depressed, anxious, and suicidal children and youth. Services were expanded in 2007 with the assistance and funding of WPH to include Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP) for depressed and suicidal teens.
In 2017, in response to Commonwealth-wide concern about suicide in college students, STAR-Clinic developed a new program for students attending a Western PA college or university, called Co-STAR (College Option, Services for Transition Age Youth at Risk). The goal of CO-STAR is to partner with local colleges and universities and provide rapid and comprehensive assessment and treatment for depressed, anxious, and suicidal undergraduate college students. Typically, these would-be undergraduate college students ages 18-24 “stepping down” from the acute inpatient level of care following a suicidal episode; students in crisis presenting at the WPH Emergency Room or students in crisis at the University Counseling Centers.
STAR Center Outreach adapts and disseminates information about best practice clinical care into practical guidelines for educational and community settings and offers trainings and consultations. STAR Center is devoted to providing training opportunities for students and psychiatric residents as well as conducting research designed to study the pressing issues related to child and adolescent suicide.
We strive to integrate education, intervention, and research into a seamless whole, because our research informs our interventions, our experience in intervention drives our research, and both shape our educational mission.
