Citation

Large MM, Ryan CJ. Soc. Psychiatry Psychiatr. Epidemiol. 2014; 49(9): 1353-1355.

Affiliation

Department of Mental Health Services, Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, Australia, mmbl@bigpond.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s00127-014-0912-2

PMID

25028199

Abstract

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