Am J Psychiatry 1979; 136:1187-1189
Copyright © 1979 by American Psychiatric Association
Opiate addiction and suicidal behaviors
JT Moore, LL Judd, WW Zung and GR Alexander
The authors tested the hypothesis that people addicted to opiates manifest
more psychopathology in areas that have been identified as predictors for
high risk of suicidal behavior than do normal control subjects. They gave
278 patients in a methadone maintenance program and 207 normal control
subjects the index of Potential Suicide (IPS), a scale designed to assess
suicidal risk. Using discriminate function analysis, the authors found that
87% of 100 of the methadone patients and 98% of 100 of the normal control
subjects were correctly identified on the basis of the IPS data.
