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Awards & Honors

Amar D. Mandavia, MA, PhD, Receives the Charles E. Gibbs Leadership Prize

Honor recognizes excellence in research on women’s health care or policy 

Mandavia and colleagues used data from a cohort of more than 100,000 veterans with alcohol use disorder and/or opioid use disorder who had received care at the VA and died between 2016 and 2020. They identified more than 5,000 veterans in the cohort who died of suicide, and within this group they compared both the age of death and the mechanisms of suicide for men and women.

The authors found that women veterans were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to die by suicide, and they died at significantly younger ages. For men, suicide deaths accounted for 21 years of potential life lost; for women, the toll was 32 lost years. Although intentional poisoning was the most common means of suicide death for both men and women, women were twice as likely to die by poisoning-related suicide. Given that many poisoning deaths involve prescribed drugs, the authors note that prescribing interventions are possible but that “strategies must strike a careful balance between ensuring access to needed medications for psychiatric disorders while reducing the overall available quantity of potentially fatal medications.”

“Our editorial board appreciated this study because not only is it methodologically strong, it also presents findings that are timely, actionable, and relevant,” said Karen McDonnell, Editor-in-Chief of Women’s HealthIssues. “These findings can help improve care for women veterans with substance use disorders.”

The Charles E. Gibbs Leadership Prize was established to honor the founding president of the board of governors of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health. Charles E. Gibbs, MD (1923–2000) was a fellow of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and past chair of ACOG’s Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women, the Task Force on the Voluntary Review of Quality of Care, the Health Care Commission and the Task Force on Maternal Health Policy.