Honors Week: Cadet Researches Suicide Prevention

Advertisers have long known that a celebrity’s endorsement of a product can increase sales, but does that marketing strategy hold true for a health care campaign, more specifically a mental health campaign? That is what Delilah Martindale ’25, a Virginia Military Institute cadet, researched for her honors thesis, “Preventing Suicide: The Effect of Visibility on Mental Health Infrastructure.”

Martindale chose the subject of suicide prevention in order to merge her major in international studies with her minor in psychology. Martindale’s advisor, Vera Heuer, Ph.D., professor in the Department of International Studies and Political Science, whose area of expertise is social movements, encouraged her to take a look at mental health care.

“Essentially, we embraced this political sociological approach and came up with a project where she examined the degree with which the visibility of an organization in trying to raise awareness for suicide prevention actually impacts tangible outcomes. It’s truly in the spirit of the Institute honors program by merging various disciplines, and she did quite a wonderful job with that,” Heuer said. 

Martindale’s research question asks, “What effect does visibility have on mental health infrastructure?” She defined mental health infrastructure (MHI) as the physical and organizational structures, facilities, and systems that collectively support the delivery of mental health care services. She hypothesized that the more visibility a campaign can create, the higher the rate of increasing MHI, and if a campaign can obtain a celebrity endorsement, it will enhance its visibility and therefore positively impact MHI.

“There is a psychological phenomenon where repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to an increased liking or preference for that stimulus. So essentially, familiarity breeds liking. The more familiar you are with something, the more likely you are to like it or have it in the forefront of your brain when you’re making decisions,” explained Martindale. 

She tested her hypothesis by examining five case studies: The Trevor Project, a leading suicide prevention/crisis intervention nonprofit for young people ages 13 to 24 of the LGBTQ+ community; The Jed Foundation, an organization established by a couple following the suicide of their son; Active Minds, a program launched by the sister of a man who committed suicide; Hope for the Day, a prominent nonprofit movement in Chicago that influences proactive suicide prevention and mental health education; and Project Semicolon, an organization founded by a woman whose father took his own life, and in which Selena Gomez, a very prominent A-list celebrity is involved as executive producer.

Martindale assigned each case study a score based on their facilities, services, resources, education, and patient interaction compared to their social media presence, celebrity endorsement, news coverage, advertising and published literature.  

She concluded that the first part of her hypothesis, “The more visibility a campaign can create, the higher the rate of increasing MHI,” is correct most of the time. “Clearly it was correct, four out of five times that I did the different case studies.”

The second part of the hypothesis, “If a campaign can obtain a celebrity endorsement, it will enhance its visibility and therefore positively impact MHI,” was inconclusive. “It seems to be more about what type of celebrity involvement there is, how actively engaged they were, what kind of endorsements they were doing, rather than general celebrity involvement,” she clarified. 

Martindale is from San Bruno, California, where she attended Capuchino High School. She is the daughter of Mary Lefevre and Dave Martindale. In addition to minoring in psychology, she also minors in Spanish and leadership studies. After graduation, she plans to commission into the U.S. Army.