Dr. Anat Brunstein Klomek a licensed clinical psychologist and supervisor in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT). she has been involved in the field of suicidality since 1999, when she started working on her PhD at Bar Ilan University in Israel focused on the relationships between adolescents at risk and each one of their parents. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) in New York.
At CUMC she was part of TASA-Treatment Adolescent Suicide Attempters study and was certified as an IPT-A expert. During those years she started a long research career in examining the association between bullying/cyberbullying and suicidal risk. Since 2008 she is the Assistant Editor of Archives of Suicide Research.
Currently, she is the Dean of the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology at Reichman University in Israel (formerly Interdisciplinary Center, IDC Herzliya). Her previous role was the director the graduate clinical program where she added emphasis on suicide prevention. In the last decade she served as the academic advisor of the Israel Ministries of Health and Education as part of the Israeli National Suicide Prevention Program.
Dr. Brunstein Klomek strongly feel that the COVID-19 pandemic forced both the general population and decision makers to realize that mental health is not any less important than physical wellbeing. She believes we should all invest great efforts in helping people express pain and seek help when they feel suicidal. Specifically, she is interested in building solid professional chains of care and training providers in specific evidence-based interventions which are focused on suicide prevention. In the last decade she advised the Ministry of Health and Education in the development of training programs for evidence-based interventions focused on suicide prevention. These included programs to train and/or supervise various levels of professionals including primary physicians, school counselors, mental health providers, etc.
Dr. Brunstein Klomek is extremely passionate about suicide prevention and believes that local efforts and international collaborations can save lives.