Therapy factors in treating severely ill psychiatric patients

We studied therapeutic factors influencing suicide during out-patient treatment in severely ill discharged psychiatric in-patients. A subsample of 25 suicide and 27 control patients were all treated by psychiatrists at the time of their suicide or at a corresponding point of time. We were not able to identify any significant psychosocial or clinical pre-discharge differences between the two groups. After discharge, the patients of the control group were treated by psychiatrists with substantially longer professional training-plus-experience, the therapist's experience being the most important therapy factor contributing to the different outcome. On the whole, the contribution of the therapy factors was modest, however, explaining only 26 per cent of the group variance.