Congratulations to Ellen Jopling and co-authors for publishing their paper titled, “Potential Lethality of Suicide Attempts in Youth” in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
Ellen and her collaborators examined actual medical lethality (the actual danger to life resulting from a suicide attempt) versus potential lethality (the potential for death that is associated with a suicide attempt) in a sample of children and adolescents admitted to a psychiatric inpatient unit following a suicide attempt. They found that over 70% of youth who made serious suicide attempts would have been misclassified by assessments relying on only actual lethality. They also documented independent and overlapping predictors of actual medical lethality and potential lethality.
Read the full paper here.