A suicide-specific diagnosis – the case against.

Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, Vol 44(3), 2023, 183-188; doi:10.1027/0227-5910/a000912Comments on an article by Cohen, et al. (see record 2023-84177-001). We applaud Dr. Cohen and her colleagues for developing the suicide crisis syndrome (SCS) and its attendant focus on high and acute suicide risk, in particular that of high and acute suicide risk that is not dependent upon the patient’s communicated suicide ideation (SI) as a gateway to its assessment. In several published papers (Berman & Silverman, 2014; Silverman & Berman, 2014a, 2014b) we have observed and commented upon the inadequacy of communicated or reported SI as a necessary condition to further es tablishing a patient’s acute risk of suicide and lamented that clinicians too often assume that the absence of SI indicates the relative absence of suicide risk. There are now more than a dozen published studies of individuals who died by suicide who denied that they were thinking about suicide when they were last asked by a clinical caregiver often within days of their deaths (see Berman, 2018). These studies highlight the importance of symptomatic and behavioral signs of high and acute risk, rather than a dependence on communicated SI as a beacon of such risk. Further, as we have written elsewhere (Silverman & Berman, 2020), we applaud Dr. Cohen and her colleagues for proposing the SCS with intent to make the features of a current crisis a central concern for the assessment and t...
Source: Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research