Dependency and suicidality in psychiatric inpatients

One hundred fifty-two psychiatric inpatients (91 women and 61 men) completed widely used objective (i.e., self-report) and projective measures of interpersonal dependency; scores on these measures were compared to two indices of suicidality derived from patients' chart records (i.e., number of past suicide attempts and physician judgments of suicidality at admission). High objective dependency scores were associated with high suicidality scores in women and men, even when level of depression was controlled for statistically. Projective dependency scores were unrelated to both suicidality indices.