Risk factors for suicide among psychiatric patients that have experienced compulsory mental care

Suicide is the leading cause of death among young adults in both Sweden and the world.

Psychiatric inpatients in general present with an excess risk of suicide yet the risk is rarely studied in the subgroup admitted by force to compulsory mental care (CMC). A CMC decision is often used to prevent suicide but its effect is rather unclear. Today, we lack information on both the underlying risk and risk factors for suicide among CMC treated patients.

The core purpose of this project is to apply epidemiological methods with a national 40-year cohort (1973-2013) of registry data to investigate both the suicide risk itself and associated risk factors for CMC patients.

This knowledge base will thereafter inform better clinical decision making (e.g. discharge risk assessment) to reduce the suicide rate in these patients.Aim 1 will investigate the risk of suicide among CMC patients, both in absolute terms and relative to other clinical populations and a representative total population sample.

Aim 2 will study risk factors for suicide with a broad focus on sociodemographic, hereditary, and clinical variables, including CMC-unique variables (e.g. interventions during CMC).This cross-disciplinary project fills a critical gap in our knowledge through straightforward Precision Medicine for a very ill yet still understudied group of psychiatric patients – in line with both VR’s specific Call and VR’s general focus on Precision Medicine.