The risk of repeated self-harm and suicide after emergency department presentation with self-harm in mental health presenters: a retrospective cohort study with data linkage in Queensland, Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Presentation to the emergency department (ED) with an index episode of self-harm is recognised as a risk factor for subsequent repeated self-harm and suicide. We describe demographic and clinical characteristics of adults (>18 years) presenting with mental health problems and self-harm to EDs in Queensland, Australia, and identify risk factors associated with repeated self-harm and suicide. Methods: This was a state-wide retrospective cohort study of adults presenting with an index self-harm presentation to any of the 27 public EDs in Queensland, Australia, over six years (1st January 2012 to 31st December 2017). We linked ED records with a state-wide death register. Primary outcomes were re-presentation with self-harm, or death by suicide. We constructed a multivariable Cox regression model to identify independent risk factors for re-presentation with self-harm, or death by suicide. We calculated the risk of repeated ED presentation for self-harm and suicide at 12- and 24-months. Findings: During the study period, 43,797 individuals presented to Queensland EDs with a self-harm related diagnosis. Half of the cohort were female (n = 20,980, 47.9%) and under age 35 (n = 23,871, 54.5%). A quarter (n = 10,991; 25.1%) had a repeated episode of self-harm and 515 (1.2%) died by suicide. Socioeconomic disadvantage, arrival by ambulance, self-presentation, small/medium hospital size, less-urgent triage category, not admitted status and previous mental health or physical health visits were associated with a re-presentation with self-harm. Suicide was associated with male sex, older age, and hospital admission. The repeated self-harm risk was 18.9% (95%CI, 18.5%-19.3%) at 12-months and 24.3% (95%CI, 23.9%-24.7%) at 24-months. The suicide risk was 0.7% (95%CI, 0.6%-0.7%) at 12-months and 1.0% (95%CI, 0.9%-1.1%) at 24-months. Interpretation: One in four people re-presented to ED with self-harm. Suicide was particularly associated with older males. Implementing evidence-based interventions to support people presenting to ED with self-harm should be a public health priority. Funding: This study was funded by an Emergency Medicine Foundation (EMF) grant (EMJS-382-R35-2021) and a National Health and Research Council Grant (1121898).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".