Antidepressive therapy in depressed clinical suicides

A total of 61 clinical suicides, all of them fulfilling the Research Diagnostic Criteria for a depressive disorder, were examined with regard to the psychopharmacological treatment they received at the time of their suicide. Scarcely half were treated with antidepressants, and only a small minority were optimally treated. One of the reasons for this therapeutic inadequacy lies in a discrepancy between the clinical and RDC diagnoses. An improvement in diagnostic practice, in the sense of paying more attention to the presence of a depressive syndrome, along with an improvement in psychopharmacological treatment, could contribute to a reduction in the clinical suicide rate, which has recently been observed to be increasing.