A new paper from the APEAL lab looking at the prediction of self-harm during the first six months in prison was recently published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology. The paper titled, ‘The predictive validity of the Depression Hopelessness Suicide screening form for self-harm among prisoners’ found that of 12 items that have been labelled as ‘critical factors’ for self-harm, a subset of 5 focused on the most severe and recent self-harm thoughts and behaviours were most predictive. Overall 51% of inmates reported at least one of the 12 items, showing the challenges of predicting rare outcomes such as self-harm in a population where risk factors are highly common. Congratulations to APEAL lab member Michael Martin who is first author on the paper.
Click here to link to the paper.
