Suicide within 12 months of contact with mental health services

BMJ 1999;319:1433 ( 27 November )

Letters

Suicide within 12 months of contact with mental health services

Local data vary from national data

Elderly people should be regarded as separate group

Rural and suburban populations can have more contact with mental health services

Authors' reply

Local data vary from national data

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Appleby et al's paper on suicide and contact with mental health services has limitations compared with local data.¹

A suicide audit team has existed in City and Hackney Community Services NHS Trust since 1995 and gathers information on suddenunexpected deaths of local residents from coroners' inquests andhospital records. We have difficulties because local coronersdo not return information because of resource pressures. Localdata were not returned to the national mortality programme ondrug related deaths,² and we are concerned that the nationalconfidential inquiry into suicide and homicide by people withmental illness may have experienced similar problems.³ Complexboundary issues in east London and a high density, highly mobilepopulation make psychiatric contacts difficult to trace, and hospitals'patient information databases are inaccurate: fewer than halfthe people on whom the team collects inquest data are registeredasdead.

We identified 84 unexpected deaths in two . . . [Full text of this article]

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Relevant Article

Suicide within 12 months of contact with mental health services: national clinical survey: Louis Appleby, Jenny Shaw, Tim Amos, Ros McDonnell, Catherine Harris, Kerry McCann, Katy Kiernan, Sue Davies, Harriet Bickley, and Rebecca Parsons
BMJ 1999 318: 1235-1239. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]