The assessment of suicidal intent is one of the most important problems of clinical psychiatry. An earlier study (Robin, Brooke and Freeman-Browne, 1968) has confirmed the high incidence of suicide in admissions diagnosed at first contact as suffering from affective disorders, and found that 8 per cent. male in-patients and 5 per cent. female in-patients so diagnosed committed suicide during a follow-up of 6–11 years. It was also shown that in male patient suicides unemployment at the time of first admission and a previous history of self-poisoning or self-inflicted injury occurred more often than in matched controls, while a history of more than one suicidal attempt was found more often in female suicides than in matched controls. Female suicides were treated less often with E.C.T. than their controls, and more often with tranquillizers.
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