Validation of Six Risk Scales for Suicide Attempters

Any kind of therapy can only be effective in preventing suicide if it is available to persons who require it at a time when they require it. Methods of ascertaining the presence of suicide risk are therefore urgently needed. A considerable amount of research work has been directed to this problem in recent years. These efforts have largely concentrated on the question of who is at risk. They have started from two basic assumptions: 1. Suicide is associated with certain dispositional factors, which include age, personality traits, mental illness, and social circumstances (biological factors have not been considered so far) 2. Presence of such factors in a person at one point in time indicates a high probability of suicide On these grounds, a number of suiciede-risk estimation scales have been developen. Typically, they consist of a list of dispositional variables, a scoring system, and an algorithm which serves to classify indiviual scores into categories of risk. In most instances, the items have been empirically derived from comparisons of suicidal and nonsuicidal subjects. Various statistical procedures have been applied to extract from the differences the variable which most powerfully discriminated between the groups