Suicide Research: A Critical Review of Strategies and Potentialities in Mental Hospitals. Part I. A: Clinical Opinion vs. Statistical Inference

This article begins with an extended discussion of psychological causality. Neither clinical intuition nor statistical prediction are entirely satisfactory as predictors of suicide. Some authors have blended the 2 types of explanation, & this approach has been more satisfactory. The author suggests that psychoanalytic theories about suicide have not been explored experimentally. He then cites the absence of material in mental hospitals, & the lack of theory about such incidents as well. (JS)