Foreseeing Self-Harm | Harvard Magazine

"Psychology professor Matthew Nock has spent his career studying self-harm, but he remains humbled by how little is yet understood about why people kill themselves....One shortcoming of traditional risk factors is that they require clinicians to rely on self-reported information from patients. What if patients aren’t forthcoming because they don’t want to be hospitalized, or are unable to report their emotional states? The bigger problem, Nock explains, is that each factor individually contributes so little to suicide risk. Depression, for example, may be correlated with suicide, but the proportion of patients with depression who attempt suicide is still vanishingly small....To comb through the many factors contributing to suicide risk in a more systematic way, Nock (profiled in “A Tragedy and a Mystery,” January-February 2011, page 32) and colleagues have been working on a new approach that uses a computer algorithm. Last September, they published the results of an early algorithm, not yet ready for clinical use, developed using health records from the Partners Healthcare system. The program scanned 1.72 million electronic medical records for every medical code—age, sex, number of doctor’s visits, and each illness or health complaint—that might predict suicide. The resulting model predicted 45 percent of the actual suicide attempts, on average three to four years in advance...."