Evolution of the Psychological Autopsy: Fifty Years of Experience at the Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner‐Coroner's Office
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The origin of the psychological autopsy was in the late 1950s and the result of a collaboration between the Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office and the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. It was conceptualized as a thorough retrospective analysis of the decedent's state of mind and intention at the time of death. It was used initially in "equivocal" deaths where the manner of death was possibly either suicide or accident. Later, it was used in cases where a party (primarily family members) protested the Medical Examiner-Coroner's suicide determination. Over the past 25 years, the University of Southern California Institute of Psychiatry, Law, and Behavioral Science has served as the psychiatric/psychological consultants to the Coroner's Department. Research findings, the use of this approach in high-profile cases, and the most recent manner in which the psychological autopsy is conducted are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".