Assessment and Prediction of Suicide

Suicide is not a neglected area in the medical and mental health fields. Even before the 1897 publication of Emile Durkheim's anchoring work on the subject, efforts at preventing suicide were well known. This work of Ronald W. Maris and 44 others, structured around the question of predicting suicide, provides an excellent update on empirical findings and theory in suicidology. When the issues of assessing and predicting the act of suicide are addressed, we quickly learn that these tasks are best separated. In brief, the conclusion offered is that for several reasons the prediction of the individual suicide is an insuperable task (pp 4, 128, 218, 632, 641). Rather, the rational effort of the clinician and researcher is most constructively directed at assessing or predicting the probable risk of suicide within a given time frame. The failure to predict individual suicides is rooted in several factors. The attempt at prediction