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It is difficult to study whether antidepressants increase suicidality. Prospective studies of suicidal behavior are impractical, and suicide is so rare that case-control studies require very large numbers of subjects. These researchers examined data from Finnish registries on 15,390 people at high risk for attempting suicide because they had been hospitalized for previous attempts from 1997 to 2003.
The investigators assessed each patient’s antidepressant use in the year before hospitalization, serious suicide attempts in the preceding 5 years, hospitalizations for suicidality, antidepressant use after the index hospitalization, and cause of death where applicable. During follow-up (average, 3.4 years after index hospitalization), 602 patien…