What do we know about suicide? Not nearly enough
Despite decades of research aimed at understanding the factors that might drive someone to attempt suicide, the sad fact is that scientists are no better at predicting self-harm than they were a half-century ago. That’s the conclusion of a new paper that examined 365 studies of suicide risk factors over the past 50 years. The review, described in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, found that even the most modern studies predicted suicidal behavior only slightly better than random chance. The solution, says senior author Matthew Nock, a Harvard psychology professor, may lie in taking a new approach to studying suicide by bundling multiple risk factors, much in the same way researchers consider factors like diet, exercise, and family history when evaluating heart disease risk. Nock and colleagues argue that suicide researchers have for too long focused on the same risk factors in isolation. These include mental disorders such as depression...