Linguistic Characteristics of Suicidal Patients in the Emergency Department

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Status

Completed

Conditions

Suicide

Treatments

Other: Standardized questionnaires and a ubiquitous questionnaire

Study type

Observational

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT01594138

2008-1421

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this study is to determine whether patients who have a high risk for serious suicide behavior will demonstrate a speech pattern that has a relationship to language patterns found in suicide notes.

Full description

In an average week the CCHMC Emergency Department (ED) evaluates 40 patients with suicidal behavior. Currently, there is no systematic method for assessment of suicide risk in these patients and often, emergency department staff are required to make judgments about the disposition of these patients without a full understanding of the patient's risk for another serious suicide attempt. This pilot project involves experts in child psychiatry, biomedical informatics, and emergency medicine to collect pilot data for developing a method to estimate the risk of serious suicidal behavior based on computational linguistics.

Enrollment

60 patients

Sex

All

Ages

13 to 17 years old

Volunteers

No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion Criteria for Suicidal Subjects:

Subjects age 13 years 0 months to 17 years, 11 months old
Admission to CCHMC ED, psychiatric units, or medical units with suicidal behavior or attempt
The patient and legal guardian must understand the nature of the study and be able to comply with protocol requirements. The legal guardian must give written informed consent and the youth, written assent.
English is spoken as the primary language in the home

Inclusion Criteria for Non-Suicidal Subjects:

Subjects age 13 years 0 months to 17 years, 11 months old
Admission to CCHMC ED with no current or no history of suicide ideation/attempt/gesture
No past or current history of a major mood disorder
No history of death by suicide in first-degree relatives
The patient and legal guardian must understand the nature of the study and be able to comply with protocol requirements. The legal guardian must give written informed consent and the youth, written assent.
English is spoken as the primary language in the home

Exclusion Criteria for Suicidal Subjects:

Any serious, unstable medical illness or clinically significant abnormal laboratory assessments that would adversely impact the scientific interpretability or unduly increase the risks of the protocol
Level of consciousness precludes consent and research assessments
Unable to assent because of severe mental retardation or incapacitating psychosis

Exclusion Criteria for Non-Suicidal Subjects:

Any current or past suicide attempts
Any serious, unstable medical illness or clinically significant abnormal laboratory assessments that would adversely impact the scientific interpretability or unduly increase the risks of the protocol.