Deployment Psychology Blog

This article provides rationale for utilizing a suicide screening procedure in a sleep medicine setting and offers suggested elements for such screening. The authors note that the connection between sleep problems and suicide risk has become well established, although the mechanisms of this relationship are not yet clear. Even though research on the relationship between sleep problems and suicide is not new (these authors note that the relationship was known nearly sixty years ago!), an increase in the amount and specificity of research examining sleep and suicide has been fairly recent and has led to the inclusion of sleep disturbance as both a risk factor and a warning sign for suicide risk.