Brain Patterns May Predict People At Risk Of Suicide

People who are thinking about killing themselves appear to have very unique brain activity that can now be measured by a computer. This may someday help doctors identify and treat more people at risk of harming themselves before they act.

More than 44,000 people commit suicide in the U.S. each year. In these people, words like “death” and “trouble” produce a distinctive “neural signature” not found in others, scientists report in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“There really is a difference in the way [suicidal] people think about certain concepts,” says Marcel Just, an author of the paper and the D. O. Hebb professor of cognitive neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University.

That difference allowed a computer program to distinguish people who thought about suicide from people who did not more than 90 percent of the time. It also allowed the computer program to distinguish people who had attempted suicide from people who had only thought about it.

The results come from a study of just 34 young adults and will need to be replicated, says Barry Horwitz, chief of brain imaging and modeling at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. But he says they hint at a future in which brain scans and computers can help assess a person’s mental health.

“Just looking at behavior is probably inadequate for a lot of purposes,” he says. “It’s much better to be able to see what the brain is doing.”

The study results also suggest that brain scans might someday help mental health professionals prevent more suicides.

“We’re very bad at identifying which people who are presenting with risk are in fact going to go on and have a suicide attempt,” says Lisa Pan, an author of the study and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Pan recalls the day one of her young patients showed up at her office saying he needed help.

“He had come with a backpack, which is unlike him,” she says.