From the Editor

Overwhelmed by the divorce, she made a serious attempt on her life, saved from certain death by a police officer who was running late for work and drove through an industrial area of Scarborough. After days of observation, I concluded that she had an unfortunate life circumstance, but not a psychiatric disorder.

How commonly do people without mental disorders attempt suicide? What can be done to help them? Dr. Maria A. Oquendo (of the University of Pennsylvania) and her co-authors try to answer these questions in a new JAMA Psychiatry paper. In their study of healthy individuals and suicide attempts, they drew on a US database involving more than 36 000 people who had attempted suicide. “An estimated 19.6% of individuals who attempted suicide did so despite not meeting criteria for an antecedent psychiatric disorder.” We consider the study and its implications.

A healthy individual – at risk for a suicide attempt?

In the second selection, Yueh-Yi Chiang (of the University of Maryland) and her co-authors focus on youth and polypharmacy in a new JAMA Network Open research letter. Concerningly, past work has suggested that polypharmacy is growing more common in the young. Chiang et al. tapped Medicaid data from one US state including almost 127 000 youth. “In this cross-sectional study, we observed a 4% increased odds of psychotropic polypharmacy per year from 2015 to 2020, indicating growing concomitant use of multiple psychotropic classes.”

And in the third selection, reporter Jim Coyle writes about former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the Toronto Star. The essay is deeply personal – Coyle discusses his own problems with alcohol and his connection with the former prime minister, who had also struggled with it. “Mulroney knew that alcoholism is no respecter of rank or status, that alcoholics understand each other across any divide, and better than anyone else can.”

There will be no Readings for the next two weeks.

DG

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