Predicting Suicide Attempts among Treatment‐Seeking Male Alcoholics: An Exploratory Study

Documented risk factors for suicide among alcohol‐dependent patients are sensitive but insufficiently specific to effectively identify individuals who are prone to future suicide attempt. As a first step to assess factors not previously considered, this pilot study involved a group of male alcohol‐dependent patients ( N  = 175) coming to detoxification to examine the potential utility of adverse childhood experiences ( ACE ) along with other documented events to discriminate individuals with a history of attempted suicide from their detoxifying peers. Family health history questionnaires were used to evaluate their ACE s. Receiver operating characteristic ( ROC ) analysis was applied to examine the predictive power of ACE s, alone or in combination with documented risk factors, to lifetime history of attempted suicide. Among our participants, 48 (27.4%) had a history of a suicide attempt and 156 (89.1%) reported at least one out of the nine categories of ACE s. Modeling by ROC analysis, we found that a cutoff of four or more ACE s plus a history of personal violence achieved the best predictive power to a history of any suicide attempt, producing a sensitivity of 0.7, specificity of 0.81, and area under curve of 0.75. A prospective study to replicate and extend our findings is necessary.