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The Ultimate Endpoint

Nature Medicine volume 18, pages 190–193 (2012)Cite this article

Subjects

Suicide is the third leading cause of death in the US among people under the age of 45. Yet psychiatrists know remarkably little about what treatments can most effectively prevent people from killing themselves. For the most part, investigators have shied away from studying the problem head-on because designing intervention studies with suicidal subjects is fraught with difficulty. Elie Dolgin talks to the small group of mental health professionals who are hoping to put an end to that.

“We essentially have next to no good information about what the most reliable treatments are to prevent suicidal behavior,” says Maria Oquendo, a psychiatrist at the Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) in New York City. “We have practically ignored the most lethal condition that we treat.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Elie Dolgin is a news editor with Nature Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts.,

    Elie Dolgin

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  1. Elie Dolgin
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Dolgin, E. The Ultimate Endpoint. Nat Med 18, 190–193 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0212-190

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