Scientizing and routinizing the assessment of suicidality in outpatient practice

Suicidal patients are difficult and challenging clinical problems. Conceptual tools aid the clinician in organizing and evaluating the clinical situation. The authors provide a framework for suicide risk assessment that emphasizes 2 domains-history of past attempt and the nature of current suicidal symptoms-that have emerged in suicide research as crucial variables. These domains, when combined with other categories of risk factors, produce a categorization of risk for the individual patient, leading, in rum, to relatively routinized clinical decision making and activity.