Predicting the Risk of Suicide By Analyzing the Text of Clinical Notes 70
First time accepted submitter J05H writes "Soldier and veteran suicide rates are increasing due to various factors. Critically, the rates have jumped in recent years. Now, Bayesian search experts are using anonymous Veteran's Administration notes to predict suicide risks. A related effort by Chris Poulin is the Durkheim Project which uses opt-in social media data for similar purposes."
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I make doctors commit suicide. God says...Neither ambitious piece constituted readest workings possessor requitest Ask sanctuary done consistent 'it fastings commiserate BUT hastened allaying deceived perished fluidness
The next revision of "After Egypt" should include punctuation.
Sounds legit (Score:2)
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That would make some sense if the suicide rate was around 50%. Thankfully it's much lower.
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Well, if the suicide rate's 10%, just say "no soldiers commit suicide," and bam, you're 90% successful.
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Clever and true, but...here is the difference between statistics and engineers who need statistics.
Now all your mistakes are in the wrong direction. For different applications you will err on the side of False Alarm or Missed Detection. In this case, a false detection means you stages an unnecessary intervention (slightly costly / embarrassing, but at least they know you care); but, a missed detection literally means someone died.
Basically this is the application of risk/reward to probability.
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Um, this isn't about predicting the suicide rate or how likely someone in the general population is going to commit suicide.
It's about how likely a veteran who writes a suicide note and gives it to someone else is going to follow through and try to commit suicide.
That rate is probably closer to the flip of a coin than it is to 10%.
Re: Fucking Retarded (Score:1)
Wait till they start scanning school kid's english papers and Facebook pages.
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Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
It's worth noting that neither happened. The citizenry still has lots of guns and people are still dying at a pretty high rate (with 2014 starting at an even higher rate than 2013).
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[1]: Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
Chavez forbid citizens from owning/possessing firearms, meanwhile putting most of the former criminals and criminal gangs to work for him as enforcers and arming them. Citizens aren't shooting each other, they're too busy just trying to survive and avoid being shot (or much worse, especially for females) by Chavez' goons.
People are still dying, it's simply not reported as such (if noted/recorded at all) when it's Chavez' own thugs doing the killing. Do you also believe the various Utopian stats the N. Korea
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Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
Yes, and now all the Venezuelans dance and sing Kumbaya, there is love and joy and peace and freedom for all!
Or is it a country run by a dictator who seizes private assets; beats, kills, or imprisons political opponents; and the paramilitary police run rampant over the populace that's starving because their currency has been ruined?
Gosh, I can never remember which it is!
Tell you what, AC, if you think post-Chavez Venezuela is a nice and safe (because no guns right?) place to live, feel free to move there, a
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Hmm, Venezuela's murder rate in 2012 was 45.1 per 100,000. In 2013 it was 79 per 100,000. Are you really stupid enough to think that before they banned civilian ownership of firearms, their murder rate was 45000+ per 100,000 annually?
Note, by comparison, that the "gun-crazy" US murder rate was 4.5 per 100,000
threat of harm to self or others or not /fill (Score:1)
sop on intake for decades now. does the 'note' say otherwise?
False positives (Score:4, Insightful)
According to the study this is 67% effective. But, once this is applied to the general population you have an issue, because the vast majority of people are not suicidal. In the US, about 122 in 100,000 people attempt suicide a year, and about one in ten are successful. Even with a test that is 99% accurate, you are going to end up with somewhere around seven million false positives every year if you screen everyone.
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The question, though, is how harmful a false positive is. If false positive means "lock the person up for their own safety," then obviously you don't want many false positives. But, if false positive just means "bring them back in a week earlier for an extra session," then this might not be too bad. Even the "false positives" --- people who don't get as far as suicide attempts --- might be folks who would benefit from a little extra help. If the seven million most-likely-to-be-psychologically-vulnerable peo
Re:False positives (Score:4, Insightful)
Seven million extra doctors' visits are hardly inconsequential, especially considering that only about 1 in 175 would actually be suicidal. Consider the time and money spent, the extra doctors who have to be trained and hired (I'm assuming psychiatrists since a GP is hardly qualified to assess a potentially suicidal patient), and the days missed from work for false alarms. That's all before the psychological trauma and loss of trust from your doctor telling you out of the blue that they think you might be mentally ill when you're not.
Besides, that's not how it would work, because once the tool is out there and used to profile everyone, someone who is suicidal will commit suicide before that 'extra session.' After that, it will be be considered negligent not to 'do something' immediately once someone is flagged, and that something would likely be intrusive and expensive.
Also, their accuracy rate is 67%, not 99%. I used that number to demonstrate a best-case scenario. As it stands, they would flag around 83 million people while only correctly flagging around 200,000. Good luck with 99.75% false positives.
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Seven million extra doctors' visits are hardly inconsequential, especially considering that only about 1 in 175 would actually be suicidal.
An interesting attitude. Compare this to Foxconn, which reduced the suicide rate among its workforce from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 400,000 in three years.
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Seven million extra doctors' visits are hardly inconsequential, especially considering that only about 1 in 175 would actually be suicidal.
An interesting attitude. Compare this to Foxconn, which reduced the suicide rate among its workforce from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 400,000 in three years.
All things considered, I think they did it by making it harder to commit suicide, and possibly also by improving labor conditions.
The usual process is to place somebody thought suicidal on a suicide watch. This can actually be very intrusive, and a test like this certainly is less than ideal if you're applying it at large--the accuracy here is for this population, and rather close to chance already. In a wider population, of a different makeup, its accuracy will be different, and probably lower.
More impo
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Total Genocide will fix every problem. Kill everything that has a genome. Everything.
Good plan, start with the AC's
A positive use of data mining (Score:4, Interesting)
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So what do they do about it? (Score:3)
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Given the sad state of affairs where everyone is in a database somewhere, that person of alleged authority has now condemned his evaluatee into a life of unemployment and that person will be condemned to be a beggar or thief the rest of his life. If he wasn't mentally troubled before the evaluation, he definitely will be after the evaluation... and probab
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"so using legal mumbo jumbo a 'mentally unfit' person ill or not can be confined indefinitely based on the court's perception"
having toured the facilities here is what happens. on a first visit you are locked away for a while in a psych unit inside a hospital. this is expensive and not everyone is going to pay for it, due to bankruptcy etc. on first visit they spend weeks on medication based on what you were called in for. usually they will court order your meds for 6 months. after the court order and a sho
so negative ... (Score:1)
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Mentally Ill means Disobedient. There is no other definition.
My font makes that look like a film title:
... means disobediant
Mentality III
Poor choice of words (Score:3)
Critically, the rates have jumped in recent years.
The rates aren't the only thing that've ah screw it.
I read the article and it's basically nonsense. (Score:3)
What they did was this: they identified 100 VA patients who committed suicide and then identified two "matched cohorts" who hadn't committed suicide, consisting of 70 patients each (one cohort had been hospitalized for psych reasons, the other hadn't). Then they gathered up all the doctors' notes and examined the frequency of all of the words and phrases occurring in the notes. Certain words and phrases occurred more frequently in the notes for patients who had committed suicide.
The single word which appeared to predict suicide most strongly was "agitation". Want to know which word was the second-strongest predictor of suicide? "Adequately". That's right, "adequately". Here are some of the other "predictor" words: "swab", "integrated", "Lipitor".
I guess the finding that "agitation" appears more frequently in the suicide cohort is of mild interest. (As the authors themselves point out, it simply confirms a piece of information that has already been well documented-- namely that agitated affect is a risk factor for suicide). The rest of it is obviously statistical noise. I don't know much about genetic algorithms or neural-net learning, but it seems to me that these techniques are being used to provide an end-run around any reasonable test for statistical significance.
One thing that the authors didn't comment on-- was the identity of the clinician a predictor for suicide? Maybe there were one or two clinicians who, for whatever reason, experienced a significantly higher suicide rate among their patients. (This would explain why "adequately" showed up so often-- every doctor has their own writing style with their own collection of pet phrases/words, and my guess is that certain doctors like to use the word "adequately" more often than others).
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This would explain why "adequately" showed up so often-- every doctor has their own writing style with their own collection of pet phrases/words, and my guess is that certain doctors like to use the word "adequately" more often than others.
I would have to know the context of how the word "adequately" was used, but a possibility is that it could have been employed in the process of clinical butt-covering. Sometimes a physician gets a bad feeling about potential adverse outcomes, yet there's maybe nothing directly actionable, and you end up with a note written in guarded terms, in preparation for legal or disciplinary review -- including perhaps careful descriptions of things that have been "adequately" evaluated or performed.
Lipitor
Patients on Lipit
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I would have to know the context of how the word "adequately" was used, but a possibility is that it could have been employed in the process of clinical butt-covering. Sometimes a physician gets a bad feeling about potential adverse outcomes, yet there's maybe nothing directly actionable, and you end up with a note written in guarded terms, in preparation for legal or disciplinary review -- including perhaps careful descriptions of things that have been "adequately" evaluated or performed.
Yeah, I actually had the same thought. It's a butt-covering sort of word and it's not generally a word that leaps to mind when you are describing someone who is doing *well*. "Lipitor"-- sure, it correlates with cardiovascular disease, but it's also something that half the world takes so I doubt if it's predictive of very much (maybe it's a proxy for advanced age which increases suicide risk). "Integrated"-- the authors make the same point as you do, it suggests someone with lots of problems and lots of