"Our work provides two important new tools clinicians can use in deciding how to treat potentially suicidal patients,? said Harvard Professor of Psychology Matthew K. Nock (right), who worked on the study with Christine B. Cha (left), a doctoral student in psychology.
Two powerful new tests developed by psychologists at Harvard University show great promise in predicting patients? risk of attempting suicide, researchers say. These tests may help clinicians to overcome their reliance on self-reporting by at-risk individuals, information that often proves misleading when suicidal patients wish to hide their intentions. Both tests are easily administered within minutes on a computer, giving quick insight into how patients think about suicide, as well as their propensity to attempt it soon. 'Experts have long sought a clear behavioral marker of suicide risk,' said Matthew K. Nock , a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of two papers describing the new assessments of suicidal behavior. ?The current approach, based on self-reporting, leads to predictions that are scarcely better than chance, since suicidal patients are often motivated to conceal or misrepresent their mental state. We sought to develop more sophisticated, objective measures of how psychiatric patients are thinking about suicide. Our work provides two important new tools clinicians can use in deciding how to treat potentially suicidal patients.' Nock and his colleagues report on the tests in two papers, one in the current Journal of Abnormal Psychology and the other in Psychological Science.
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