Dr. David Shaffer was a psychiatrist who did pioneering studies on child and teen suicide that led to more effective prevention methods.
- Died: October 15, 2023 (Who else died on October 15?)
- Details of death: Died in Mastic Beach, New York, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 87.
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David Shaffer’s legacy
Born in South Africa, Shaffer began his groundbreaking work in the 1960s at London’s Maudsley Hospital, where he trained in psychiatry. Suicide had not been widely studied at that time and was considered unpredictable. Efforts to study its causes, with an eye on prevention, began in the late 1950s and early ‘60s using the psychological autopsy method, of which Shaffer was a pioneer. With this method, scientists study the histories of people who have died by suicide to look for clues and patterns that can help them identify warning signs of suicide. Shaffer focused on the suicide deaths of children to find the patterns unique to these tragic deaths.
Shaffer’s findings included several patterns, such as previous suicidal behavior, a school disciplinary incident, alcohol use, and recent suicides of peers or in the news. Understanding that those things could trigger patterns of self-harm in others helped with the creation of suicide prevention and intervention materials that could be used by schools, therapists, and parents.
Later in life, Shaffer worked at Columbia University, where he created the TeenScreen, a mental health screening initiative aimed at evaluating suicide risk in young people. He was Columbia’s Irving Philips Professor of Child Psychiatry in the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, and he was chief of pediatric psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Shaffer was also the former husband of longtime Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Tributes to David Shaffer
Full obituary: The Washington Post
