TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2016//
TI  - Pokorny's complaint: the insoluble problem of the overwhelming number of false positives generated by suicide risk assessment
JO  - BJPsych bulletin
A1  - Nielssen, Olav
A1  - Wallace, Duncan
A1  - Large, Matthew
SP  - e115.053017
EP  - e115.053017
VL  - 40
IS  - 6
N2  - Alex Pokorny's 1983 prospective study of suicide found that 96.3% of high-risk predictions were false positives, and that more than half of the suicides occurred in the low-risk group and were hence false negatives. All subsequent prospective studies, including the recent US Army Study To Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (STARRS), have reported similar results. We argue that since risk assessment cannot be a practical basis for interventions aimed at reducing suicide, the alternative is for mental health services to carefully consider what amounts to an adequate standard of care, and to adopt the universal precaution of attempting to provide that to all of our patients.     © 2016 The Authors. This is an open-access article published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 2056-4694
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1192/pb.bp.115.053017
ID  - ref1
ER  -