Group Therapy for Persons at Risk for Suicide: An Evaluation Using the Intensive Design

A screening procedure was used to randomly assign 24 persons at high risk for suicide to a special group therapy program designed for depressed & suicidal persons. A case fatality rate of 10.3% was obtained for all persons attending at least one session, which is consistent with the 10% mortality rate found across all treatment modalities; however, the case fatality rate dropped to 3.4% for persons attending more sessions. The strongest beneficial change took place in the first 5 sessions.