Suicidal attempt ; Emergency care ; Psychiatric follow-up
Abstract
Objective : To find the associated factors of psychiatric follow-up after suicide attempts, the clinical characteristics and psychiatric follow-up of patients who had visited the emergency room after suicide attempt were analyzed by reviewing their medical records. Methods : 347 patients who had visited the emergency rooms of two university hospitals from January to December in 2011 were enrolled as the subject of this study. Their medical records were reviewed and demographics and clinical factors were compared depending on the patient’s psychiatric follow-up. Results : The two thirds of total suicide attempt patients were the first time suicide attempters. One hundred and forty-one patients (40.3%) were in a drunken state when they attempted suicide and came to the emergency room. Only 16% of patients were directly admitted to general ward from emergency rooms whereas the rest refused to be hospitalized. Fifteen percent of patients who refused hospitalization visited the outpatient clinic after the emergency treatment. In multivariate analysis, drunken state was inversely and previous outpatient treatment experience was positively associated with psychiatric follow-up after suicide attempt. Conclusion : This study implies that more specific history-taking and sophisticated intervention program should be considered for the patients who come to emergency rooms after suicide attempt in a drunken state and also for the suicide attempters who had not received psychiatric treatment before.