The judgment of future suicide-related behavior: Helpline counselors' accuracy and agreement

Judging whether a youth is at risk for suicide-related behavior (SRB) is considered an extremely challenging task. There are only few studies of helpline counselors, and little is known about their ability to accurately determine the level of risk for SRB.

To examine whether helpline counselors can agree on judgments of risk for SRB, and whether their judgments are consistent with youths' actual behavior in a 6-month period following intake.

34 helpline counselors, recruited from three helplines, were studied. Information was collected on their judgments of risk for SRB for each of 45 youths over a 6-month period following initial intake.

Contrary to expectations, the counselors had a high rate of agreement (k = .56), and their risk judgments could be used quite successfully (80.0% correct classification) in identifying youths who later engaged in SRB.

Unlike most other groups represented in the decision-making literature, helpline counselors agree and are accurate in their judgments of risk for SRB. Our findings suggest that it might be beneficial to apply some of the procedures used to train helpline clinicians to other types of clinicians. Further studies of helpline clinicians are suggested.