Austen Riggs Center

According to a recent report by the CDC, suicide rates have consistently increased over the last 15 years in the United States. Sources of risk for suicide attempts, which include both factors that are malleable (such as hopelessness) and those that are not (such as family history of suicide), have contributed to the development of multiple screening measures for suicide; however, the evaluation of risk factors alone has been shown to have limited efficacy in predicting individual suicide attempts. The fact remains that it is extraordinarily difficult to understand, let alone predict, the situations and influences that bring a person to try to take his or her life.