From the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
Abstract
- Objective: To provide a review of emergency department (ED)-based psychosocial interventions that support adult patients with an identified suicide risk towards a goal of reducing subsequent suicidal behavior through the period after discharge, which is known to be a time of high risk for suicidal behavior.
- Methods: Non-systematic review of the literature.
- Results: Multiple methods of engaging patients after discharge from the ED have been shown to reduce subsequent suicidal behaviors. These methods include sending caring letters in the mail, facilitating supportive phone conversations, case management, and protocols that combine different services. Overall, the existing literature is insufficient to recommend widespread adoption of any individual strategy or protocol. However, providing psychosocial and emotional support to patients with an identified suicide risk after they are discharged from the ED is feasible and may reduce subsequent suicidal behaviors. Templates for providing supportive outreach using different modalities now exist, and these may help guide the ongoing development and widespread adoption of more effective and cost-effective solutions.
- Conclusion: Many ED–based interventions that provide enhanced support to patients with suicide risk after they are discharged have demonstrated a potential to reduce the risk of future suicidal behavior.
Key words: suicide; emergency department.
Despite the fact that emergency department (ED) providers often feel unprepared to manage suicide risk, patients with significant suicide risk frequently receive care in EDs, whether or not they have sustained physical injuries resulting from suicidal behavior [1,2]. Patients make greater than 400,000 visits to EDs in the United States each year for suicidal and self-injurious behaviors (suicide attempts and self-injurious behaviors are typically coded in ways that make them indistinguishable from each other in retrospective analyses) [3], and it is estimated that 6% to 10% of all patients in EDs endorse suicidal ideation when asked, regardless of their original chief complaints [4]. Meanwhile, suicide has become the 10th leading cause of death in the United States [5], and the Joint Commission has charged all accredited health care organizations with providing comprehensive treatment to suicidal patients, which may range from immediately containing an acute risk to ensuring continuity of care in follow-up [5].
When an acute suicide risk is identified in the ED, the provider’s immediate next steps should be to place the patient in a safe area under constant observation and to provide an emergency assessment [5,6]. Although psychiatric consultation and/or psychiatric admission may follow this assessment, suicide risk does not require admission in all cases; and some patients with suicide risk may be discharged to an outpatient setting even without receiving a psychiatric consultation [1]. Regardless of whether an outpatient disposition from the ED is appropriate, however, the period that immediately follows discharge is a time of high risk for repeated suicidal behavior and suicide death [7–9], and only 30% to 50% of patients who are discharged from EDs after a self-harm incident actually keep a follow-up mental health appointment [9,10]. Therefore, any support given to patients through this transition out of the emergency care setting could be especially high-yield.
The Joint Commission recommends that all patients with suicidal ideation receive, at minimum, a referral to treatment, telephone numbers for local and national crisis support resources (including the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK), collaborative safety planning, and counseling to restrict access to lethal means upon discharge [5]. However, some programs have demonstrated the capacity to provide enhanced support to patients beyond discharge from the ED, with some success in reducing the rates of subsequent suicidal behaviors. This non-systematic review describes interventions that can be initiated in the context of an ED encounter with the purpose of reducing future suicidal behavior among adult patients. They are primarily psychosocial rather than clinical. Clinical interventions that apply psychotherapy [11–13] psychopharmacology [14], and specialized inpatient treatments [15] have been studied as well but are beyond the scope of this review.
Interventions to Support Patients At Risk of Suicide After Discharge from the ED
Brief Contact Interventions
The idea that maintaining written correspondence with patients who have a known suicide risk after discharge can reduce subsequent suicide rates originated with a study of psychiatric inpatients conducted by Motto and Bostrom, in which patients who had been admitted for depression but had declined outpatient treatment were randomly assigned to periodically receive letters containing supportive messages from staff members over a period of 5 years [16]. This study remarkably found that these so-called brief contact interventions (BCIs), which were personalized to each recipient but did not contain psychotherapy per se, were associated with a reduced rate of suicide throughout the duration of the program compared with no written contacts [16].