Citation

Brent DA. Lancet Psychiatry 2015; 2(6): 482-483.

Affiliation

Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Electronic address: brentda@upmc.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00210-2

PMID

26360428

Abstract

In The Lancet Psychiatry, Yaron Finkelstein and colleagues bring us grim news. They report a longitudinal study in which, after a 7·2 year follow-up, the 20 471 adolescents who presented in an emergency department for a first episode of self-poisoning were more than 32 times more likely to die from suicide at 1 year and more than five times more likely to die an accidental death than the 1 023 487 controls. The median time to suicide was 3 years after the initial self-poisoning episode. Other risk factors for suicide were male sex, recurrent self-poisoning, hospital admission for the overdose, and psychiatric care within the previous year.

Language: en