Psychiatric contacts among youths aged 13 through 24 years who have made serious suicide attempts

Objective: To compare the history of psychiatric contacts among young people who have made medically serious suicide attempts and control subjects. Method: Using a case-control design, the authors contrasted 129 young people who made serious suicide attempts with 153 randomly selected community controls on a series of measures of lifetime, prior year, and prior month contacts with psychiatric services. Results: Of those who made serious suicide attempts, 78.3% had a lifetime history of contact with health services for psychiatric reasons, 72.1% reported contact within the year preceding the suicide attempt, 58.9% reported contact within the month preceding the suicide attempt, and 29.5% had a lifetime history of psychiatric hospital admission. Within the year preceding the suicide attempt, 21.7% had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and 67.4% had outpatient consultations for psychiatric problems. Multiple logistic regression suggested that the best psychiatric service predictors of risk of serious suicide attempt were admission within the preceding year (p < .005) and outpatient consultation within the preceding month (p < .0001). Conclusions: Young people making serious suicide attempts had vastly elevated rates of a range of psychiatric contacts including hospital admissions and outpatient, consultations. These findings imply that the development of improved treatment and management strategies for young people with psychiatric morbidity may be a very effective approach to reducing youthful suicidal behaviors.