{"id":223921,"date":"2025-10-24T05:42:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/ai-tools-fall-short-in-predicting-suicide-study-finds"},"modified":"2025-10-24T05:42:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:42:03","slug":"ai-tools-fall-short-in-predicting-suicide-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/ai-tools-fall-short-in-predicting-suicide-study-finds","title":{"rendered":"AI tools fall short in predicting suicide, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ai-tools-fall-short-in-predicting-suicide-study-finds2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The accuracy of machine learning algorithms for predicting suicidal behavior is too low to be useful for screening or for prioritizing high-risk individuals for interventions, according to a new study <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pmed.1004581\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> September 11 in the open-access journal <i>PLOS Medicine<\/i> by Matthew Spittal of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues.<\/p>\n<p>Numerous risk assessment scales have been developed over the past 50 years to identify patients at high risk of suicide or self-harm. In general, these scales have had poor predictive accuracy, but the availability of modern machine learning methods combined with electronic health record data has re-focused attention on developing <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/new+algorithms\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">new algorithms<\/a> to predict suicide and self-harm.<\/p>\n<p>In the new study, researchers undertook a systemic review and meta-analysis of 53 previous studies that used machine learning algorithms to predict suicide, self-harm and a combined suicide\/self-harm outcome. In all, the studies involved more than 35 million <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/medical+records\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">medical records<\/a> and nearly 250,000 cases of suicide or hospital-treated self-harm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The accuracy of machine learning algorithms for predicting suicidal behavior is too low to be useful for screening or for prioritizing high-risk individuals for interventions, according to a new study published September 11 in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Matthew Spittal of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues. Numerous risk assessment scales have [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1495,41,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-health","category-information-science","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}