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Imagine a patient sitting in front of you, weary of life, urgently asking you for help. As a therapist, you do what you do best in this situation: you take a coin out of your pocket, toss it in the air, and see which side it lands on: Heads. “Well,” you say cautiously to the patient, “it looks like you are at risk of suicide.” Based on this result, you classify the patient as suicidal and initiate the standard suicide prevention strategies.
Okay, let’s forget that scenario quickly: who would decide a matter life-or-death by flipping a coin, right?
It turns out that assessing risk factors for suicide (De Beurs, 2024) doesn’t work much better than a coin flip, as decades of evidence shows. In a…