39 Years of Suicide Research: A Personal View

Abstract

This is a personal account of the beginning of clinical research in suicide in a hostile intellectual climate, of the methodology that has informed most of the subsequent research, and of the very durable findings of that work over 12 replications. The genius of the late Dr. Eli Robins lies at the base, not only of this research methodology, but of the diagnostic system that gives it clinical meaning. All of this is now commonplace, but it was not always so.