Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Management of Suicidal Behaviour (IN: The International Handbook of Suicide and Attempted Suicide, edited by K Hawton & K van Heeringen)

This chapter provides an overview of approaches to the management of attempted suicide patients in which psychiatrists are not directly involved, but in which nurses, social workers or general medical teams carry out asessessment &/or treatment. The reasons why these alternative approaches were developed are discussed. The efficacy of these treatments have been studied in a number of controlled studies. Although these studies were mainly conducted with selected samples of relatively low-risk patients, the results show support for the alternative assessment & treatment approaches. (24 refs.)