Linda Durst, MD
Chief Medical Officer for Maine Behavioral Healthcare
Chair, Department of Psychiatry, Maine Medical Center
Dr. Linda Durst currently serves as Chief Medical Officer for Maine Behavioral Healthcare and Chair, Department of Psychiatry, Maine Medical Center and holds the appointment of Visiting Associate Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine. Prior to her work with MBH and MMC, Dr. Durst was Medical Director of the Institute of Living and Associate Chief, Department of Psychiatry, Hartford Hospital. She previously served as Chief Medical Officer at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine and Medical Director/Vice Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona. Dr. Durst has been actively engaged in the area of suicide prevention, developing a suicide screen for the University of Arizona Health System, South Campus, active in multiple quality improvement teams on suicide prevention, and has taught physicians and non-physicians in suicide assessment. She received training at the Zero Suicide Academy in Maryland, as a member of one of 20 teams selected nationally and internationally. Dr. Durst was trained in the CASE interviewing strategy developed by Shawn Shea, MD to assess for suicide risk and the CBT-suicide prevention module developed by David Rudd, PhD. She chaired the Hartford Healthcare Behavioral Health Network’s Suicide Prevention Task Force and had been responsible for rolling out Zero Suicide to the Hartford Healthcare Behavioral Health Network and assisting in the roll-out in the state of Connecticut. Dr. Durst was elected as a member of the American College of Psychiatrists in 2017, for her expertise in Administrative Psychiatry. Currently, Dr. Durst is planning to introduce Zero Suicide to the MaineHealth system.
Dr. Durst’s major research interests include suicide and violence prevention. She has initiated and participated in projects in the last three hospitals she worked at. Major projects included working with medical students and residents at Penn State on Quality Improvement on Inpatient Psychiatric Units – studying times of violence and precipitants so that interventions could be initiated. This was the first time trainees and students were formally engaged in Quality Improvement research projects and the program continues today.
Her major interest is in suicide prevention. She was able to initiate a Zero Suicide project at Hartford Healthcare. Dr. Durst was able to facilitate Hartford Healthcare’s collaborator role with the University of Connecticut to help develop a psychological phenotype for suicide risk via the electronic health record and initiate interventions, potentially.
Dr. Durst was able to initiate a pilot project to treat suicide attempters on an inpatient psychiatric unit with the CBT-SP module (David Rudd, Ph.D. developer) in collaboration with David Tolin, Ph.D. This treatment was usually done in the ambulatory setting. They piloted an inpatient study due to the extremely high risk of suicide post inpatient psychiatric hospitalization.
The abstract for this initial study is being submitted currently and she has received a formal acknowledgment in the abstract for her leadership and support of the project. The abstract is titled: “Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies for Suicidal Inpatients”.
In addition, she was able to facilitate inpatient groups for suicide prevention on inpatient adolescent units with a pilot to evaluate post discharge suicide attempts. Due to the success of preliminary data, they were able to initiate outpatient groups in their ambulatory setting for follow up. She was also able to facilitate inpatient clinical trials with Ketamine and Rapastinel, with one study being done on adolescents, one of two such studies in the world.
The University of Connecticut is currently submitting an abstract from the Connecticut Zero Suicide Research Collaborative of which she was a member and contributor to the project and will be mentioned as an author as a member of the collaborative. The title of the abstract is “The imperative of well-trained clinical workforce to achieve Zero Suicide”.