Effect of Patient and Therapist Factors on Suicide Risk Assessment
Abstract
The present study examined how patient risk factors and clinician demographics predict the assessment of suicide risk. Clinicians (N = 333) read two vignettes, one of which manipulated patient risk factors, then rated the patient's likelihood of suicide and need for hospitalization. Clinicians' assessments were heterogeneous. Results indicated that certain patient risk factors (access to excess medication) and clinician demographics (relationship status, religiosity) predicted perceived suicide risk; and, moreover, clinicians' suicide risk assessment did not always align with the decision to hospitalize the patient. The authors discuss methods for standardizing clinicians' judgment of risk and minimizing error through debiasing strategies (cognitive forcing strategy).
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Unstructured clinical approaches may be more inaccurate and subject to cognitive biases, including overemphasis on predisposing factors and risk aversion.
“Some studies have shown that these unstructured approaches may be more inaccurate and subject to a range of cognitive biases on the part of the assessor, including an overemphasis on predisposing factors51 and risk aversion.52”
From Suicide (2020) · cites this paper as [52]
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 39 · Cited by 33
- Authors
- Berman, N. C., Stark, A., Cooperman, A., Wilhelm, S., & Cohen, I. G.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Berman, Noah C.
- Venue
- Death Studies
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2015-04-29
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 433-441
- ISSN
- 0748-1187 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-7683
- OpenAlex
- W1992978258
- Cited by
- 33
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 3 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1 · 2015: 2
- FWCI
- 2.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Death Studies (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Suicide and Self-Harm Studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Family Practice › Clinical Reasoning and Diagnostic Skills
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Opioid Use Disorder Treatment
- Keywords
- suicide risk assessment, clinical judgment, patient risk factors, hospitalization decision, religiosity, bias mitigation
- MeSH terms
- Suicide Prevention, Adult, Aged, Clinical Competence, Female, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, Professional-Patient Relations, Surveys and Questionnaires, Suicide, Risk Assessment, Young Adult
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
