| Abstract | Studies indicate that Suicide is generally a complication of a psychiatric disorder. More than 90% of suicide victims have a diagnosable psychiatric illness, and most people who attempt suicide have a psychiatric disorder. Moreover, 50% of people who commit suicide had sought professional help within one month of the act. This fact affords an opportunity for prevention. The high level of medical intervention before suicide is possible and effective prevention. Careful assessment of physical and psychological symptoms including personal and family history can indicate the degree of suicide risk. Based on the assessment, more effective recognition and treatment of depressive illness may substantially reduce suicide rate. In this talk, we will present a new clinical decision support system for improving mental health risk screening and assessment. The system will contain a tool for risk screening, recording patients’ data, and providing risk assessment for suicide. Our developed system takes both patients’ records and expert knowledge based classification criteria as inputs, and gives the quantified risk prediction. Based on the prediction, the targeting intervention plan can be provided. The potential users of the system are front line and second line mental health service workers. The health and social benefit of this system include earlier identification of people at risk, reducing suicide rate, educating and training of mental-health service providers, increasing public awareness of mental health risk and appropriate interventions. |
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