CLASSIFICATION OF SUICIDAL AND NONSUICIDAL OUTPATIENTS - A CLUSTER-ANALYTIC APPROACH

The revised Beck Depression inventory (BDI), Hopelessness Scale (BHS), Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and Scale for Suicide Ideation (SSI) were ad ministered to 1,172 outpatients diagnosed with mixed psychiatric disor ders. The SSI then was used to classify the patients into 127 (10.8%) suicide ideators and 1,045 (89.2%) nonideators. Both agglomerative-hie rarchical and nonhierarchical cluster analyses then were employed to i dentify three types of nonideators, who represented anxious depressed, hopeless depressed, and below-average overall symptomatology, and fou r types of ideators, who reflected hopeless, anxious depressed, severe ly suicidal, and below-average overall symptomatology. Implications of these classification systems for describing psychopathology were disc ussed.