Katherine Anne (Kate) Comtois, PhD, MPH

Faculty Appointment(s)

Professor

Leadership Role(s)

Vice Chair for Research

kcomtois@uw.edu

206-744-1752

UW Medicine profile »

Personal Statement

My career goal is to give suicidal clients and their clinicians the best chance to succeed. I have been working in the area of health services, treatment development, and clinical trials research to prevent suicide for over 30 years. My graduate training was in community/clinical psychology and focused on achieving clinical ends through prevention and other systemic interventions in socio-culturally diverse populations. I have brought these perspectives into health services research.  I have developed or adapted interventions to improve care and clinician willingness to work with suicidal patients including Caring Contacts, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS), and Preventing Addiction Related Suicide (PARS). I have developed an adaptation of DBT Next Steps, a program to assist psychiatrically disabled individuals find and maintain living wage employment. My research has been funded by NIMH, NIDA, the Department of Defense, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the State of Washington.

I am the director of the Center for Suicide Prevention and Recovery (CSPAR) whose mission is to promote the recovery of suicidal individuals and the effectiveness and well-being the clinicians and families who care for them by conducting rigorous and ecologically valid research, developing innovative interventions, improving policies, systems and environments of care, and providing expert training and consultation. CSPAR faculty and staff seek a deep understanding of the cultures and settings in which we work that leads to meaningful and effective interventions ready for implementation.

I also direct the Suicide Care Research Center, an NIMH P50 funded research center focused on using Human Centered Design and MOST optimization methodology to improve the care of adolescents and young adults (age 13-30 years) in outpatient medical settings. We are conducting one fully powered trial, three R34s, and 4 pilot studies within UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s hospital to develop innovative interventions to support primary care, Collaborative Care, and specialty medical clinics care for patients experiencing suicidal thoughts and behavior. The center supports effort of over 20 faculty and 16 staff as well as 11 emerging and advanced collaborating scholars and funds 2 annual pilot grants (each $100,000 over two years).

In addition to clinical research, I founded the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration (SIRC) focused on disseminating and implementing innovative, evidence-based interventions in the systems that need them. Beyond my research, I directed the Harborview Dialectical Behavior Therapy program at Harborview Medical Center 1996-2019, co-lead the UWAnnual Comprehensive DBT Training Program and Suicide Care in Healthcare Systems: We Can Do Better Serving our Patients and Caring for our Clinicians, both of which meet the Washington State requirement for suicide prevention training.  I have a long history of training and mentoring junior faculty, post-doctoral scholars, psychiatry residents, pre-doctoral psychology interns, undergraduate students, and post-baccalaureate trainees. I provide psychotherapy and consultation at the UWMC Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic.

Education

MPH , Health Services , University of Washington, Seattle , 2009
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Severe Mental Illness , Harborview Medical Center , 1992-1994
Ph.D. , Clinical/Community Psychology , University of Maryland, College Park , 1992
M.A. , Clinical/Community Psychology , University of Maryland, College Park , 1990
B.A. , Psychology , Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick , 1986

Department Affiliations

Centers/Programs
Training Programs

Scholarly Expertise

Clinical Expertise

Teaching Philosophy

Clinically: I believe that clinical teaching should meaningfully improve trainees clinical skill and judgment including respect for the patient’s strengths and perspective, treatment alliance, fund of knowledge, and engagement and commitment of patients to treatment. Even when psychiatrists do not conduct psychotherapy after graduation, they often supervise and direct those who do. I believe it is critical that they truly understand what psychotherapy is, how and when it works, and the strategies within it in order to guide the services they will supervise throughout their careers. Psychologists often come to training in our department with a large fund of knowledge and clinical experience, but frequently from limited settings with mild to moderate illness. I believe it is critical for psychologists to gain exposure and experience adapting evidence-based psychotherapies to more severe psychopathology and to patients in more difficult circumstances as well as within the limits of Medicaid and Medicare funding. Not only do they graduate as stronger and more flexible clinicians, they can be more effective as researchers and teachers as well.

Research: I believe health services and clinical trial researchers need to deeply understand not only the patients and their struggles, but also the clinicians and systems who struggle to serve them and the social and cultural contexts from which they come. In addition, researchers need to understand their own academic context, that of the funders and reviewers of their work, and what is critical to career and funding success. Smart, thoughtful researchers who cannot get their research funded leave important questions unstudied and interventions untried. This helps no one. Thus, I am committed to helping new researchers understand what they study, how to study it well, and how to fund their research so they can succeed and change the future of health services.

Recent Publications

Tailored strategies to increase the use of an evidence-based psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder: A stepped-wedge randomized trial in military clinics.
(2025 Dec)
J Anxiety Disord 116(): 103080
Rosen CS, Peterson AL, Riggs DS, Haddock CK, Fong C, Young-McCaughan S, Cook J, Comtois KA, Borah EV, Davis CA, Dondanville KA, Finley EP, Jahnke SA, Mistretta M, Neitzer A, Wiltsey-Stirman S, Frick ER, Hayes O, Clayton S, Conforte AM, Flores A, Jinkerson J, Jones ZK, Kim HJ, Letendre M, Link JS, Nofziger D, Ringdahl EN, Waggoner JW, Woodworth C, Ho E, McLean CP, TACTICS Research Group
Sociodemographic Factors and Mental Health in Health Care Professionals and Patients During COVID-19.
(2025 Jul)
Rural Ment Health 49(3): 288-303
Radin AK, Zheng Z, Shaw J, Brown SP, McCue E, Fouts T, Skeie A, Peña C, Youell J, Flint H, Doty-Jones A, Wilson J, Chan KCG, Fruhbauerova M, Walton M, Comtois KA
Partnering with Policymakers to Design Suicide Care Research: Maximizing Impact in Adolescent Mental Health Policy.
(2025 May 11)
Evid Based Pract Child Adolesc Ment Health
Comtois KA, Salisbury J, Clifton RL, Grumet JG, Adrian M
Exploring the Impact of the Caring Contacts Intervention on the Stress and Distress of Veterans and Service Members: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.
(2025 Aug 13)
JMIR Res Protoc 14(): e72140
Wright B, Evanson A, Casey C, Law KC, Rogers AH, Comtois KA
Safety planning and transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral therapy for adolescent suicide prevention in Mozambique: study protocol for the SPI/TCBT-S hybrid effectiveness/implementation cluster randomized trial.
(2025 Jul 1)
BMC Psychiatry 25(1): 656
Wagenaar BH, Muanido A, Turner M, Lovero KL, Darnell D, Sharma M, Comtois KA, Ramiro I, Cumbe VFJ
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