Taking suicide out of the darkness

Dr. Steven Schonfeld ’74M (MD) dedicates his life to suicide prevention

In 1968, when Steven Schonfeld ’74M (MD) was a 19-year-old college student, his father died by suicide. Thirty years later, his brother also died by suicide.

“My family has been deeply affected by suicide,” says Dr. Schonfeld, who retired in 2018 after a 43-year career as an accomplished intensivist/pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist. “We’ve gotten through these tragedies by getting the support we needed.”

But it’s been a difficult road for him, his family, and others affected by suicide.

When his father died, Schonfeld was at Brown University, five hours away from his family in Rochester. Nicki, his girlfriend—and now wife of 52 years—was there for him and provided the support he needed.

“Back then, people didn’t know what to do, so they just didn’t talk about it,” he says. “Things are changing, but it’s still an issue that many are hesitant to address. Loss survivors continue to need support well after a suicide death occurs.” Dr. Schonfeld adds that suicide is preventable, with the right information, resources, and support systems in place.

Schonfeld’s personal experience with suicide, his commitment to medicine, and his connection to Rochester led him and Nicki to make the first-ever endowed gift to support the University of Rochester Medical Center’s (URMC’s) Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide (CSPS). The center was founded as the Laboratory for Suicide Studies in 1988 by Drs. Eric Caine, now professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry, and Yeates Conwell, professor and vice chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and expanded to the CSPS in 1998.

The couple’s gift will help support medical student education, bring experts to campus for lectures and meetings, and provide pilot funding to help faculty and trainees pursue novel research in suicide prevention.

“Rochester had been in my sights for a while,” says Dr. Schonfeld. “It made sense to set up a program to support the science and study of suicide where I grew up and went to medical school.”

In addition to providing philanthropic support to the CSPS, Dr. Schonfeld has also partnered with Dr. Conwell and others to provide suicide prevention education to URMC’s School of Medicine and Dentistry medical students. For instance, he has attended virtual conferences with  postdoctoral fellows who are developing careers in suicide prevention research, giving them his distinctive perspective as both a loss survivor and a medical professional.

“Suicide is still a stigmatized topic that often flies under the radar and Dr. Schonfeld is doing a great deal to change that,” says Dr. Conwell. “Unfortunately, there’s a mismatch between the pressing needs of people and communities affected by suicide on one hand and then what we can bring to bear to address the problem on the other. But, because of Dr. Schonfeld’s and his wife’s generosity and his willingness to talk about his personal loss, our center can educate more people about suicide risk, assessment, and management and we can continue to translate our research into practice to help more people.”

Helping others who have been affected by suicide has long been a priority for Dr. Schonfeld. For 10 years, he’s been involved in the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Over the last three years, he’s been giving “Talk Saves Lives” presentations—including virtual ones during COVID-19—to community and professional groups in the Baltimore area. He often addresses schoolteachers, veterans, older adults, first responders, families and teenagers, and those in the medical and LGBTQ communities.

“It’s vital that we get the word out, move suicide out of the darkness, and help people to see and treat it as the medical condition it is,” he says. “Think about it: with a heart attack, we have to look for warning signs. If we take the same approach to suicide, we can save lives.”