The assessment, management, and treatment of suicidality: Toward clinically informed and balanced standards of care

This article reviews and integrates the current literature on assessment, management, and treatment of suicidality. The review provides an integration of existing literature within a conceptual framework that allows for direct clinical application and assists in developing and articulating definable, clinically informed, empirically supported, and balanced standards of care across the clinical domains of risk assessment, ongoing management, and treatment of suicidality. Finally, limitations in our current knowledge base are identified (e.g., application of risk assessment findings to daily clinical decision making), subsequent constraints on clinical practice are emphasized (e.g., lack of any clear consensus on effective treatment or management approaches), and directions for future research are discussed (e.g., treatment effectiveness studies, risk assessment over clinically relevant time periods).