Clinicians' assessments of suicide risk: can self-report measures replace the experts?

This study examined the possibility of using standardized self-report measures as "stand-ins" for clinicians' assessments of suicide risk. Subjects were 252 new applicants to a military mental health clinic who completed a battery of questionnaires and underwent clinical interviews. The self-report measures of psychiatric symptomatology (general and depression), personality (impulsivity, anger), and cognitions (hopelessness, attitudes toward life and death) were not highly correlated with clinicians' assessments of suicide risk and some showed a non-linear association. These findings suggest that the two methods of assessment are not interchangeable and that clinicians base their assessments of suicide risk, at least in part, on factors not assessed by the above questionnaires.