“Psychiatric admission in the preceding year was highly associated with risk of dying from suicide,” concluded the researchers. “Furthermore, even individuals who have been in contact with psychiatric treatment but who have not been admitted are at highly increased risk of suicide.” Essentially, the researchers found that increasing levels of psychiatric care are associated with “a severely increased risk of dying.” They concluded, “The public health significance of this finding may be considerable.”
They also suggested that we may have therefore discovered the most accurate predictor of suicide we’ve ever found: The more someone seeks or is forced into psychiatric care, the closer they probably are on the trajectory towards suicide.
The only problem with this line of reasoning is that there’s no evidence to support it. Suicide is not a progressive illness like cancer; that is, there’s no evidence that people with suicidal feelings travel on a trajectory of ever-intensifying, ever-more-constant suicidal feelings while getting into ever more intensive psychiatric care until they die at steadily increasing rates along the way. If suicidality was in fact progressive in that way, we’d be much better at identifying where people are along that path and intervening at the right time to prevent suicides. Instead, completed suicides tend to be impulsive.......