their clients with suicidal thoughts will make a suicide attempt in the coming days, weeks, or months. Third, many risk factors identified in prior studies cannot be feasibly assessed in clinical settings, such as diagnoses obtained from semi-structured interviews or the results of extensive self-report questionnaires.6, 8, 10 Fourth, prior studies have identified individual risk factors but have not yielded a method of combining risk factors to derive a single measure of the short-term (e.g., 12-month) risk of a suicide attempt. More specifically, prior research has shown that suicide attempts are predicted by specific demographic factors,1, 14–16 family history factors,17, 18 childhood adversities,19–21 psychiatric disorders,7, 8, 22–26 and past history of suicidal behaviors.27, 28 However, this research has not yet provided clinicians with a method of systematically assessing these factors and using the resulting information to estimate the level of risk associated with their presence.
