The results of a study in this issue of the Journal cast further doubt on the appropriateness of suicide risk assessment when patients receive hospital-based psychiatric care. They also raise the disturbing possibility that psychiatric care might, at least in part, cause suicide. The study, by Hjorthøj and associates, is a nested case–control study that compared Danish residents who died by suicide between 1996 and 2009 with living age-, sex- and year-matched controls. The authors describe the relationship between suicide and the extent of psychiatric treatment in the previous year [1]. The study found that, compared to those who had no psychiatric treatment in the previous year and after adjustment for other risk factors: those who only received psychiatric medication had 5.8 times the risk of suicide; those with at most outpatient psychiatrist treatment had 8.2 times the risk of suicide; non-admitted patients who had contact with emergency departments had 27.9 times the risk....
Language: en
", language="en", issn="0933-7954", doi="10.1007/s00127-014-0912-2", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00127-014-0912-2" }