"A New Type Of Diagnosis Could Make It Easier To Spot If Someone May Attempt Suicide"
In the public imagination, suicide is often understood as the end of a torturous decline caused by depression or another mental illness. But clinicians and researchers know that suicidal crises frequently come on rapidly, escalating from impulse to action within a day, hours, or just minutes. That understanding is one reason a movement is building to define suicidality as a condition in its own right. Most recently, researchers from Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Florida State University have agreed to collaborate on a joint proposal for a new diagnosis in the next Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a handbook published by the American Psychiatric Association. The criteria include familiar symptoms of depression, but these symptoms occur in an acute state that is not currently obvious to clinicians. Proponents say it could spur more research and make it easier for suicidal patients to get the care they need. Nearly once a week, attending psychiatrist Dmitriy Gekhman at Mount Sinai Beth Israel sees a patient who has attempted suicide and is hard to classify, though he must find a relevant code for each patient’s chart. “You kind of go through the history and everything, and they’re not depressed. They don’t meet the criteria for depression, they don’t meet criteria for bipolar disorder, and they don’t have a personality disorder,” he said. “We just discharged somebody this week who that happened to, and we still have somebody on the unit now.”
— Dmitriy Gekhman, MD, Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai