[Suicide risk and care of suicide attempters]

Starting from the notion of suicidal risk and a critique of its usage, it is possible to distinguish groups whose suicidal risk is particularly high. The suicidal group-composed of persons who have already attempted to commit suicide once-is in this paper the subject of general considerations as well as personal research. The latter shows that it is still difficult to detect those persons who are about to commit suicide and that tell-tale signs-be they clinical or resulting from tests-are still not very reliable. The difficulties encountered by secondary prevention are made obvious by two pieces of research done on the taking in charge of suicide-prone persons in a university general hospital. the timely recognition of the pre-suicidal syndrome and of the self-denial syndrome is very important for suicide prevention. Self-depreciation, and consequently the narcissistic blow is, as are the aggression phenomena, one of the psychological cores which lead to an act of suicide. Medical attitudes concerning the suicidal person are analyzed, and the difficulty in the psychotherapeutic relationship is stressed. Pratical considerations on the psychotherapeutic approach to the suicidal person close up the article.