Suicidal Risk Assessment Techniques in the New Issue of the "Counseling Psychology and Psychotherapy" Journal

The new issue of the "Counseling Psychology and Psychotherapy" journal (№2, 2023) contains articles united by a special topic - "Suicidal behavior: risk groups, methods of risk assessment and issues of psychological help".

The issue opens with materials devoted to one of the most controversial issues of suicidology – the methods of diagnosis of suicide risk. In the first one, the authors consider a wide range of modern methods of diagnosing suicide risk, including questionnaires, clinical conversation, screenings, and interviews. The publication is significantly complemented by the following material, the authors of which attempted to select the most reliable meta-analyses of the effectiveness of methods for diagnosing suicide risk in adolescents. It is well known that adolescents are one of the most serious suicide risk groups.

A group of specialists from the State Budgetary Healthcare Institution Research Institute of Emergency Children’s Surgery and Traumatology of the Moscow City Department of Health describes the experience of working with adolescent suicides accompanied by serious injuries. The dynamics of such suicide attempts in adolescents in recent years are presented with a tendency to grow. The authors propose some hypotheses as to the causes of this disturbing epidemiology.

The next article is devoted to a little-studied contingent in modern suicidology and presents an overview of suicide risk factors in pregnant women. The authors of the article, by considering various biological, sociodemographic and psychological factors, create a generalized portrait of a pregnant woman at risk.

The special issue concludes with a study on the methods of helping the relatives of suicide victims, with a special focus on the methods of working with the family.

The digest of this special issue includes descriptions of the results of three of the latest meta-analyses. The topic of the first is youth suicidal behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The second meta-analysis focuses on the self-disclosure of those with suicidal ideation and confirms the well-known fact that more than half of those who attempted suicide did not inform anyone of their intentions, including for fear of being institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. The third meta-analysis reviews research on suicide risk factors and existing methods of care.

The editors hope that the articles of the special issue will be useful to Russian scientists and practitioners working in the field of suicidology.