Suicidal Behavior as a Child Psychiatric Emergency

Abstract

THIS PAPER reports the results of a retrospective and follow-up study of 75 children and adolescents with suicidal behavior at the child psychiatry clinic at University Hospitals, Cleveland. They were part of a total group of 170 child psychiatric emergencies seen over a two-year period at our clinic. In an earlier paper¹clinical and follow-up data on these emergencies were presented and compared with those of a randomly selected group of regular clinic intakes of children not considered emergencies. Similarly to other authors^2,3we were impressed by the prominence of suicidal behavior as a major cause of emergency referrals to a child psychiatry clinic. Some of the demographic and clinical differences between our group of emergencies and that of regular clinic intakes lost their significance when the subgroup of 75 suicidal children was removed from the emergency group and the