Suicide risk assessment: State of the art and future perspectives

Current epidemiological data reveal that suicide is a prominent cause of death worldwide with approximately one million victims per year and therefore represents a major challenge for the public health systems of modern societies. To improve our methods of suicide prevention, the reliable assessment of an individual person’s suicide risk at any point in time with sufficient sensitivity and specificity appears to be an important milestone, but this has not yet been achieved. The present contribution provides a review of the enormous complexity of the problem and suggests an integrated approach taking into account not only clinical and psychosocial aspects, but also recent neurobiological findings