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Using Clinician Notes to Predict Suicide Risk

Preliminary study reveals potential value

Publish date:: November 12, 2015

Linguistic analysis can help identify use of distancing language by clinicians, a potential marker of suicide risk, according to an analysis of clinicians’ notes of VA outpatients.

Investigators used linguistics software to construct categories related to distancing language and to examine trends. Analysis of clinical notes for 63 outpatients who died from suicide and those who did not revealed a significant difference in clinicians’ distancing language. Keywords related to distancing language were also evident in those who committed suicide, and they increased in frequency close to the time of suicide.

The authors noted that suicide risk assessment tools normally do not examine the text of notes written by clinicians about patients who later die from suicide.

Citation: Westgate C, Shiner B, Thompson P, et al. Evaluation of veterans’ suicide risk with the use of linguistic detection methods. Psychiatr Serv. 2015;66(10):1051-1056.

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