Estimate Suicide Risk Research Articles

Managing suicidal emergencies: Recommendations for the practitioner.

All practicing psychologists with an active caseload occasionally encounter a patient or client whom they consider to be a suicidal emergency. Few psychologists, however, have had education or training focused on managing such cases, The current article conceptualizes what a behavioral is, gives recommendations for containing the emergency client's emotional turmoil, and sets forth an evidencebased approach, using diagnosis-specific risk factors, for improving the clinician's ability to estimate suicide risk. Recommendations are also given for appropriate responses to the patient or client on the basis of the level of estimated risk. Having such an algorithm or plan for dealing with the suicidal client is essential to good practice.

Preliminary field-testing of a risk estimator for suicide.

A 15-item suicide risk estimator, empirically derived from a prospective study of 2,753 suicidal persons, was given a field trial in five clinical settings. Two hundred ninety subjects were included. Volunteer crisis workers needed an average of 4.5 minutes to complete the instrument, and rated its ease of administration 2.5 on a 5-point scale. When compared with clinical ratings, the instrument estimated suicide risk slightly higher than did the interviewers. Scale items that differed from the raters' intuition tended to be omitted more than others. The trial provided valuable information needed to prepare for a large scale evaluation.

Development of a clinical instrument to estimate suicide risk.

This report details the development of an empirical suicide risk scale for adults hospitalized due to a depressive or suicidal state. The authors studied 2,753 such subjects prospectively regarding 101 psychosocial variables. In a 2-year follow-up, 136 (4.94%) of the subjects had committed suicide. Rigorous statistical analysis, including a validation procedure, identified 15 variables as significant predictors of suicidal outcome. These were translated into a paper-and-pencil scale that gives an estimated risk of suicide within 2 years. Such an instrument can provide a valuable supplement to clinical judgment and a quantitative expression of suicide risk.

Estimating suicide risk among attempted suicides: I. The development of new clinical scales.

A discriminant function analysis was carried out to separate a sample of 75 suicides from a sample of 146 attempted suicides, on which comprehensive clinical and social data were recorded on an identical schedule. Two sets of discriminating items (with 18 and 6 variables) correctly classified 91 per cent and 83 per cent of the two samples in their respective groups. The results provide a basis for examining the usefulness of these variables as predictors of future suicide in people who have attempted suicide.

Suicide Risk Factors In Alcohol Abuse

The "clinical model" approach to estimating suicide risk assumes that persons sharing specific attributes will also share certain indicators of vulnerability to suicide. This would warrant an empirically derived risk assessment scale applicable only to persons with those attributes. Nine hundred seventy eight persons at risk for suicide who met our criteria for alcohol abuse were interviewed at length and followed for two years, during which 53 (5.5 percent) committed suicide. Eleven variables which best differentiated those who suicided from those who did not in an index set were then applied to an independent validation set. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed.