Identification of Suicide Attempters by Means of MMPI Profiles

Multivariate procedures were used to determine whether psychiatric patients who had made a suicide attempt immediately prior to hospitalization (n=161) could be differentiated from nonsuicidal psychiatric patients (n=161). Multivariate analysis of variance & cluster analysis failed to identify differences in the MMPI data of suicidal & nonsuicidal patients. In contrast, discriminant analysis produced a modest degree of differentiation that generally was maintained in the cross-validation.