Scientizing and Routinizing the Assessment of Suicidality in Outpatient Practice

The authors provide a framework for suicide risk assessment that emphasizes 2 domains – history of past attempt & the nature of current suicidal symptoms – that have emerged in suicide research as crucial variables. These domains, when combined with other categories of risk factors, produce a categorization of risk for the individual patient, leading, in turn, to relatively routinized clinical decision making & activity. (34 refs)