Suicide in the medical setting.

Area of Science:

• Medical research
• Public health
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Limited understanding of suicide within general hospital settings.
• Lack of accurate data on hospital-based suicides, including prevalence, demographics, and risk factors.
• Existing literature on medical/surgical ward suicides is scarce, necessitating hypothesis generation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To summarize existing literature on completed suicides in general hospital medical/surgical wards.
• To generate hypotheses for future investigation into in-hospital suicides.
• To compare hospital-based suicides with those in psychiatric settings and the general population.

Main Methods:

• Systematic literature search of MEDLINE, PsycINFO, IndexCat, and Scopus for English-language articles.
• Inclusion of articles detailing inpatient suicides in general hospitals.
• Comparison of findings with data on psychiatric inpatients and U.S. general population suicide statistics.

Main Results:

• Twelve articles reporting 335 medical setting suicides were analyzed.
• Data limitations include selection bias, incomplete reporting, and small sample sizes.
• No significant setting-specific findings emerged; however, medical inpatients may differ demographically and in methods used compared to other populations.

Conclusions:

• Clinically relevant distinctions between suicides in different healthcare settings remain undetermined due to lack of systematic data.
• Prospective, detailed data collection is crucial for a comprehensive characterization of medical inpatient suicides.
• Improved characterization can inform suicide prevention and institutional policies in hospitals.