Suicide and schizophrenia: data from a prospective community treatment study.

ABSTRACT

This article reports the analysis of prospectively gathered data on eight young adults who committed suicide during an ongoing longitudinal study of long-term treatment of schizophrenia in the community. Young adult men with an early onset of psychiatric illness were identified as a high-risk subgroup. At the time of admission to the study, the subjects who eventually committed suicide reported significantly more distress and tended to be less satisfied with their lives than the other subjects. Specifically, baseline measures of self-reported subjective distress were consistently predictive of later suicide, whereas interviewer-rated measures and postbaseline assessments were not.