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Published Online: 14 January 2020

Medically Treated Self-Injury Among Children and Adolescents: Repeated Attempts and Service Use Over 1 Year

Abstract

Objective:

Clinical, demographic, and service use patterns of youths ages 6–18 years who had a medically treated self-injury were examined to understand factors associated with recurrence of such an injury in the subsequent year.

Methods:

This retrospective cohort analysis used data from 31,147 youths who were medically treated for self-injury. Data were from IBM/Watson MarketScan commercial claims and encounters databases (2007–2016). The index self-injury was defined as the first event with an ICD code related to self-injury or suicidal ideation combined with a wound code. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to determine the hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) describing associations with subsequent medically treated self-injury for youths who were hospitalized in psychiatric facilities in the seven days before or after the index self-injury versus those who were not.

Results:

Approximately 2% of the 31,147 youths had another medically treated self-injury in the year following the index self-injury. The hospitalized group had higher service use in the years prior to and following their self-injury, but the mean number of outpatient psychiatric visits before the index self-injury did not differ significantly between groups. Hazard ratios for clinical, demographic, and service use variables indicated that those who were hospitalized in psychiatric facilities for the index event were twice as likely (95% CI=1.7–2.7) as those who were not to have another medically treated self-injury in the year after the index event.

Conclusions:

In this retrospective, observational study, psychiatric hospitalization after self-injury was strongly associated with recurrence of self-injury in the subsequent year.

HIGHLIGHTS

Among youths with a medically treated self-injury, nearly all had outpatient medical visits in the previous year, and the mean number of emergency department visits in the previous year was two.
In the year before their medically treated self-injury, few youths were engaged in outpatient psychiatric care, and use after the index self-injury episode was modestly higher among youths who were hospitalized for the index event.
A strong association was found between inpatient psychiatric hospitalization within 7 days of self-injury and recurrence of self-injury in the year after hospitalization, when the analysis controlled for age, sex, region, insurance, year, and psychiatric disorders.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults in the United States (1). Rates of suicide increased from 1999 to 2014 for all age groups under age 75, with young adolescent girls (ages 10–14) demonstrating the largest increase (200%) in the 15-year period (2). Recent estimates from the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Survey indicated that nearly one in five students (17.7%) seriously considered attempting suicide and that almost one in ten (8.6%) reported making a suicide attempt (1).
Self-injurious behavior, with or without intent to die, is the most reliable predictor of future suicide attempts and death by suicide (3, 4). Although there are important distinctions and incomplete overlap between youths who engage in nonsuicidal self-injury and those who attempt suicide, previous research found that nonsuicidal self-injury was second only to suicidal ideation as a predictor of suicidal behavior (5). Despite generative efforts to understand, develop, and evaluate interventions targeting self-injury in outpatient psychiatric (69), emergency medical (10), and community-based settings (1113), the clinical course and outcomes among adolescents who have prior self-injury is not well characterized and remains understudied (14). Information about the typical patterns of service use is vital to improve outcomes for youths, because it can underscore gaps in usual care (15). This may be particularly important for addressing the secondary and tertiary prevention needs of youths who have presented to the hospital following self-injury.
There are substantial gaps in understanding the role of hospitals in providing treatment for self-injury. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of comprehensive approaches to suicide prevention (e.g., Zero Suicide [16]) to increase the effectiveness of the response to individuals at risk. Risk identification across published studies is poor (17), and elucidating patterns of repeated self-injury in the context of typical service use patterns would be valuable to direct outreach efforts. Knowledge about usual care for adolescents who have medically treated self-injuries is limited (1821), and existing data sources can be leveraged to understand the trajectories associated with conventional service use patterns among adolescents who have history of self-injury.
Data from adult psychiatric inpatient populations have suggested that there may be limitations to conventional health care responses to acute suicidality and self-injury (2224), in that inpatient psychiatric care may not yield clinically meaningful reductions in suicidality over time (22). Access to and engagement in outpatient psychiatric services among adolescents recently discharged from acute psychiatric care remain limited (2529). The findings illustrating difficulties with engagement in and use of psychiatric services are based on clinical trials, and evaluation of usual care patterns at a national level with a generalizable sample of youths followed over time has not been published.
Prior work has examined the impact of time and of demographic and clinical factors on encounters related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors in emergency departments and acute care hospitals by using the Pediatric Health Information System data set. This research highlighted that hospital care for youths with suicidal thoughts or behaviors doubled in the time range evaluated from 2008 to 2015 (30). Furthermore, increases were observed in all age groups and racial and ethnic groups, with more substantial change among older adolescents, girls, and non-Hispanic white youths (30). These authors did not differentiate between youths who reported thinking about suicide and youths who engaged in self-injury. We sought to extend this study by evaluating the demographic and service use characteristics of youths who had a prior medically treated self-injury, given that this is the most reliable predictor of a subsequent suicide (3, 17) and that only a subset of youths who consider suicide will harm themselves (1).
Given the limited evidence focused directly on youths who have medically treated self-injury, this study sought to compare the clinical characteristics of children and adolescents who were admitted for inpatient psychiatric care and those who were not. In addition, this study explored differences in the risk of repeated self-injury following an index episode of medically treated self-injury. Having more information about typical service use practices and behavioral patterns for high-risk youths will contribute to a better understanding of opportunities for designing suicide prevention efforts.

Methods

Data Source

Data were collected from the IBM/Watson (formerly Truven Health Analytics) MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters Databases (2007–2016). These databases contain inpatient, outpatient, and pharmacy claims for patients covered by employer-sponsored commercial insurance across the United States. The inpatient and outpatient claims databases include procedure- and visit-level details from medical claims, including ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM diagnoses and CPT medical procedure codes, dates of service, and variables describing the financial expenditures of both the patients and their insurance plans. The outpatient pharmacy claims database provides prescription dispensing details that include National Drug Code and generic identifiers of the drugs dispensed, dates dispensed, quantities, days’ supply, and payments made for each claim. A separate eligibility and demographics file provides additional information about each patient, such as age, gender, insurance plan type, geographic location, and enrollment status by month.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

We identified patients with inpatient or outpatient codes for self-injury or suicidal ideation accompanied by a poisoning or a wound diagnosis code by using the algorithm identified by Simon and colleagues (31) (a table listing ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM codes used for inclusion criteria is available in the online supplement to this article). For patients with multiple instances of self-injury, we counted the first appearance of these codes in the data as the index self-injury. We excluded patients who were under age 6 and over age 18 at the time of the index self-injury. Because we were interested in health care utilization for 1 year before and after the index self-injury, we included patients whose index event was between January 1, 2008, and December 31, 2015, and excluded patients who did not have at least 365 days of enrollment before and after their index self-injury. Furthermore, because we were interested in associations between hospitalization in a psychiatric facility and subsequent self-injury, we excluded patients who had inpatient hospitalizations in psychiatric facilities more than 7 days before or after the index self-injury.

Variable Definitions

The main outcome variable of interest was whether patients had a subsequent medically treated self-injury in the year following the index self-injury. We used the Simon and colleagues’ (31, 32) algorithm to identify subsequent medically treated self-injury and required at least 8 days to have elapsed between the index and the subsequent self-injury. Five categories of psychiatric disorders in the year prior to the index self-injury, including unipolar mood disorders, bipolar mood disorders, psychotic disorders, behavior disorders, and anxiety disorders were created, and a summary score ranging from 0 to 5 was used to indicate the number of disorder diagnoses recorded for each patient. Health care utilization in the year prior to and the year following the index self-injury, including inpatient admissions at any type of facility (psychiatric facilities, residential substance abuse facilities, and comprehensive inpatient rehabilitation facilities), was assessed. Similarly, we examined outpatient visits at psychiatric facilities, including community mental health centers, residential substance abuse facilities, psychiatric residential treatment centers, nonresidential substance abuse facilities, and comprehensive rehabilitation facilities.
We also assessed emergency department visits. Medications filled for any indication in the following therapeutic classes were counted: antihistamines and combinations, anticholinergic-antiparkinsonian agents, anticholinergic-antispasmodic agents, sympathomimetic agents, centrally acting alpha2-adrenoceptor agonists, alpha or beta blockers, opiate agonists, benzodiazepines, succinamides, miscellaneous anticonvulsants, antidepressants, and tranquilizers-antipsychotics. Health care use that occurred within 1 week before or after the index self-injury was considered to have been related to the index event and thus was not included as pre- or postindex use. We also examined whether patients received mental health assessments for their index self-injury (defined as having ICD-9-CM codes V70.1 or V70.2 or ICD-10-CM code Z04.6 within 1 day of the index self-injury).

Analytic Strategy

We performed descriptive statistics for demographic variables, including age at the time of the index self-injury, gender, type of health insurance plan, geographic region, the calendar year of the index self-injury, whether the patients received mental health assessments during their index self-injury event, and whether they received diagnoses for mood disorders in the year prior to the index self-injury.
For each health care utilization described above, we examined the proportion of our population that had at least one utilization in the year prior to the index self-injury, and we separately examined the proportion that had at least one utilization in the year after the index self-injury (again excluding the 7 days before and after the index self-injury). We also examined the mean and standard deviation of the number of times each utilization occurred in each of the 1-year periods before and after the index self-injury. All utilizations were stratified by whether patients had hospitalizations in a psychiatric facility within 7 days of the index self-injury. We tested the significance of the differences between those who were and were not hospitalized in a psychiatric facility by using chi-square tests for categorical variables and t tests for continuous variables. Alpha was adjusted (i.e., Bonferroni correction) for multiple comparisons (k=103), and only p values less than 0.0005 were considered statistically significant.
To assess the risk of subsequent self-injury, we used Cox proportional hazards regression to find hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs). We also performed a log-rank test to determine whether the hazard curves significantly differed depending on whether the patients were hospitalized in a psychiatric facility in the 7 days before or the seven days after the index self-injury. We adjusted for patient age (continuous), sex, region of residence, health insurance plan type, calendar year of index self-injury, and number of psychiatric diagnosis categories that the patients had in the year prior to the index self-injury. Because some patients were missing data on geographic region and health insurance plan type, we performed multiple imputation (33) to impute these adjustment variables.
Finally, for sensitivity analyses, we performed the same analyses stratified by whether patients were hospitalized at any time in the year before and the year after the index self-injury, in the 8 to 365 days before the index self-injury, and in the 8 to 365 days after the self-injury event.

Compliance With Ethics Guidelines

This study was exempt from review by the University of Washington Institutional Review Board by self-determination under category 4 secondary data analysis.

Results

Patient Characteristics

A total of 262,034 patients had codes for at least one self-injury event from 2008 to 2015 (see patient flow diagram in online supplement). Of these patients, 28% (N=73,657) were between the ages of 6 and 18 at the time of their index self-injury. Of these, 32,281 (44%) had at least 1 year of enrollment prior to and after the index self-injury, and of those, 1,134 youths who were hospitalized at some other time within the 2-year period were excluded, leaving 31,147 (96%) who either did not have a hospitalization in a psychiatric facility at any time in the year before or after the index self-injury or had a hospitalization related to the index injury. Among the 31,147 patients, 128 (0.4%) died—most (N=100, 78%) from the index self-injury; most of those who died (N=80, 63%) were ages 15–18. Of the 31,147 patients who met our inclusion criteria, 527 (1.7%) had a subsequent medically treated self-injury in the following year. No patients had more than one subsequent medically treated self-injury in the year following the index self-injury.
Table 1 presents data on the characteristics of the 31,147 patients in the study cohort, by whether or not they were hospitalized within 7 days of the index self-injury. The proportion of females was greater among the hospitalized patients (73%), compared with those who were not hospitalized (54%). The region with the largest proportion of hospitalized patients was the West. The proportions of youths who had diagnoses of the psychiatric disorders evaluated in this study were larger among hospitalized youths (Table 2).
TABLE 1. Characteristics of 31,147 patients ages 6 to 18 who were medically treated for an index self-injury from 2008 to 2015, by whether they were hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for the index eventa
 Not hospitalized (N=29,120)bHospitalized (N=2,027)cTotal population (N=31,147) 
CharacteristicNRow %NRow %N%pd
Age (M±SD)14.1±3.1 15.5±1.7 14.2±3.1 <.001
Age group      <.001
 6–115,768992615,79419 
 12–144,2939522254,51515 
 15–1819,059911,779920,83867 
Gender      <.001
 Male13,38698541413,92745 
 Female15,734961,486917,22055 
Type of health plan      <.001
 Comprehensive21796842251 
 Exclusive or preferred provider organization19,309941,238620,54766 
 Health maintenance organization2,6819223182,9129 
 Point of service1,6169213181,7476 
 Consumer directed or high deductible5,0799338275,46118 
 Missing218 37 255  
Geographic region      <.001
 Northeast4,8079712934,93616 
 North Central7,8769453668,41227 
 South10,20393748710,95135 
 West6,0849161396,69722 
 Missing150 1 151  
Year of index self-injury      <.001
 20081,297965741,3544 
 20092,1829413362,3157 
 20102,6889610642,7949 
 20114,2349615944,39314 
 20123,5769423063,80612 
 20134,2109238384,59315 
 20144,6049241385,01716 
 20156,3299254686,87522 
Mental health assessment performed at time of index self-injury1457841221861<.001
a
Patients with a hospitalization in a psychiatric facility more than 7 days before or after the index event were excluded.
b
Patients were hospitalized in the 7 days before or after the index self-injury.
c
Patients were not hospitalized in the year before or in the 7 days after the index self-injury.
d
Values significant at <.001 were also significant at <.0001.
TABLE 2. Diagnoses of 31,147 patients ages 6 to 18 who were medically treated for an index self-injury from 2008 to 2015, by whether they were hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for the index eventa
 Not hospitalized (N=29,120)bHospitalized (N=2,027)c 
DiagnosisN%N%pd
Unipolar mood disorder     
 Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder1441352<.001
 Major depressive disorder3,8661380340<.001
 Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia)1,042420210<.001
 Premenstrual dysphoric disorder70<1181<.001
 Depressive disorder due to medical condition1341302<.001
 Other specified or unspecified4,6941690845<.001
 Any unipolar mood disorder6,54122124261<.001
Bipolar mood disorder     
 Bipolar I49021075<.001
 Bipolar II2821653<.001
 Cyclothymic disorder23<12<1
 Bipolar disorder due to a medical condition1331301<.001
 Other specified or unspecified6<10
 Any bipolar mood disorder83631829<.001
Psychotic disorder     
 Delusional disorder17<13<1
 Brief psychotic disorder117<1402<.001
 Schizophreniform disorder10<14<1
 Schizophrenia41<1101<.001
 Schizoaffective disorder (bipolar and depressive)54<1181<.001
 Psychotic disorder due to a medical condition9<10
 Other specified or unspecified75131889<.001
 Any psychotic disorder806320810<.001
Behavior disorder     
 Conduct disorder51<19<1
 Disruptive behavior disorder5992864<.001
 Oppositional defiant disorder90031497<.001
 Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder3,5891237819<.001
 Any behavior disorder4,3351550625<.001
Anxiety disorder    <.001
 Generalized anxiety disorder1,543529114<.001
 Panic disorder4131904<.001
 Obsessive-compulsive disorder3251603<.001
 Posttraumatic stress disorder56921136<.001
 Acute stress disorder50<15<1
 Phobia3061653<.001
 Separation anxiety32<12<1
 Adjustment disorder63<1141<.001
 Any anxiety disorder2,628947724<.001
Psychiatric disorders summary scoree   <.001
 019,5926756928 
 15,5261966933 
 22,724950525 
 3979321311 
 42601583 
 539<1131 
a
Patients with a hospitalization in a psychiatric facility more than 7 days before or after the index event were excluded.
b
Patients were hospitalized in the 7 days before or after the index self-injury.
c
Patients were not hospitalized in the year before or in the 7 days after the index self-injury.
d
Values significant at <.001 were also significant at <.0001.
e
N of psychiatric disorder diagnoses.

Services Utilization Prior to Index Self-Injury

Table 3 compares service utilization by whether patients were hospitalized within 7 days of the index self-injury. In the 12 months prior to the index self-injury, patients who were hospitalized had higher levels of psychiatric and health services utilization, compared with those who were not hospitalized (Table 3). In the year prior to the index self-injury, the rate of attending one or more outpatient visits for psychiatric services was 12% among hospitalized patients, compared with 2% in the nonhospitalized group. However, among patients with at least one outpatient visit, the mean number of outpatient visits in the year prior to the index did not differ significantly between the groups (Table 3). In the year prior to the index, the hospitalized group had a higher rate of use of any outpatient health services, compared with the nonhospitalized group. A larger proportion of hospitalized patients filled prescriptions for at least one indicated medication, compared with the nonhospitalized patients (74% versus 62%) (Table 3).
TABLE 3. Service use in the 12 months before and after an index self-injury event by 31,147 patients ages 6 to 18, by whether they were hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for the index eventa
 Not hospitalized (N=29,120)bHospitalized (N=2,027)c 
Period and service typeN%N%pd
12 months before index self-injury     
 Inpatient claims     
  ≥1 inpatient hospitalization (any location)2,8201054627<.001
  N of inpatient hospitalizations (unique admissions, any location) among those with ≥1 inpatient hospitalization (M±SD)1.6±1.2 1.6±1.0 
 Emergency department (ED) claims     
  ≥1 ED visit9,7453390545<.001
  N of ED visits (unique days) among those with ≥1 ED visit (M±SD)1.9±1.8 2.3±2.9 <.001
 Outpatient claims     
  ≥1 outpatient visit at any psychiatric facility549223912<.001
  N of outpatient visits (unique dates of service, any psychiatric facility) among those with ≥1 outpatient visit (M±SD)8.2±10.7 6.8±8.8 
  ≥1 outpatient visit at any type of facility27,246941,94596<.001
  N of outpatient visits (unique dates of service) at any type of facility among those with ≥1 outpatient visit at any type of facility (M±SD)10.5±14.6 16.2±16.7 <.001
  ≥1 prescription filled for a medication for any indication18,160621,50274<.001
  N of prescriptions filled for a medication for any indication among those with ≥1 prescription filled for a medication for any indication (M±SD)10.0±12.3 15.4±16.7 <.001
12 months after index self-injury     
 Inpatient claims     
  ≥1 inpatient hospitalization at any location3,0661163031<.001
  N of inpatient hospitalizations (unique admissions, any location) among those with ≥1 inpatient hospitalization at any location (M±SD)1.7±1.4 1.9±1.5 
 ED claims     
  ≥1 ED visit10,0583599549<.001
  N of ED visits (unique days) among those with ≥1 ED visit (M±SD)2.1±2.5 2.5±2.5 <.001
 Outpatient claims     
  ≥1 outpatient visit at any psychiatric facility960350025<.001
  N of outpatient visits (unique dates of service, any psychiatric facility) among those with ≥1 outpatient visit at any psychiatric facility (M±SD)8.9±12.0 6.7±9.9 <.001
  ≥1 outpatient visit at any type of facility27,755951,98898<.001
  N of outpatient visits (unique dates of service) at any type of facility among those with ≥1 outpatient visit at any type of facility (M±SD)14.4±18.5 26.1±22.7 <.001
  ≥1 prescription filled for a medication for any indication19,003651,66982<.001
  N of prescriptions filled for a medication for any indication among those with ≥1 prescription filled for a medication for any indication (M±SD)13.1±15.0 23.0±19.8 <.001
 Subsequent self-injury after the index self-injury4171.41105.4<.001
 Time (days) to subsequent self-injury (median±SD)e117±101 95±96 
a
Patients with a hospitalization in a psychiatric facility more than 7 days before or after the index event were excluded.
b
Patients were hospitalized in the 7 days before or after the index self-injury.
c
Patients were not hospitalized in the year before or in the 7 days after the index self-injury.
d
Values significant at <.001 were also significant at <.0001.
e
Range of days: nonhospitalized group, 8–365; hospitalized group, 8–351.

Services Utilization Subsequent to Index Self-Injury

As shown in Table 3, in the year after the index self-injury, the rate of inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations was higher among patients hospitalized within 7 days of the index injury, compared with those who were not (31% versus 11%). Similarly, the rate of emergency department use was higher among the hospitalized patients (49% versus 35%). A larger proportion of hospitalized patients used any outpatient psychiatric services in the year after the index self-injury (25% versus 3%). Among patients with at least one outpatient visit in the year after the index self-injury, the mean number of visits was significantly higher among nonhospitalized patients, compared with the hospitalized group. A small but statistically significant difference was noted between nonhospitalized (95%) and hospitalized (98%) patients with regard to accessing any outpatient health services in the year following the index self-injury. The mean number of visits to any type of facility was higher among hospitalized patients, compared with nonhospitalized patients (26.1 versus 14.4 visits). As in the year prior to the index self-injury, the proportion of patients who filled prescriptions for at least one indicated medication was higher among the hospitalized patients (82% versus 65%).

Self-Injury in the Year Following the Index Self-Injury

In the year after the index self-injury, a larger proportion of the hospitalized patients sought medical attention for self-injury, compared with the nonhospitalized group (5.4% versus 1.4%) (Table 3). As shown in Figure 1 and Table 4, youths who were hospitalized in a psychiatric facility within 7 days of the index self-injury were twice as likely as those who were not hospitalized to have another medically treated self-injury in the year after their index self-injury (adjusted HR=2.13, 95% CI=1.72–2.67), after the analysis adjusted for age, gender, geographic region, year of index self-injury, and number of categories of psychiatric diagnoses in the year prior to the index (p value for log-rank test <0.001). However, no significant difference was found between the hospitalized and nonhospitalized group with regard to the median time to onset of another medically treated self-injury (hospitalized, median=95 days; nonhospitalized, median=117 days; p=0.34).
FIGURE 1. Risk of recurrence of self-injury, by whether the patient was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility for the index self-injurya
aThe cumulative hazard curve shows the risk of subsequent self-injury in the 365 days following the index self-injury, stratified by whether the patient had at least 1 inpatient hospitalization in a psychiatric facility in the 7 days before or the 7 days after the index event. Adjusted for patient age (continuous), sex, region of residence, health insurance plan type, calendar year of index self-injury, and psychiatric disorders summary score. p<.001, for log-rank test.
TABLE 4. Association between patient characteristics and risk of subsequent self-injury in the 365 days after the index self-injury
VariableHRa95% CIpb
Hospitalization in psychiatric hospital in the 7 days before or the 7 days after index self-injury (reference: not hospitalized)2.131.72–2.67<.001
Age1.071.03–1.11<.001
Male (reference: female).69.57–.83<.001
Health insurance type (reference: consumer directed or high deductible)   
 Comprehensive insurance.57.18–1.81
 Exclusive or preferred provider organization.83.67–1.04
 Health maintenance organization.97.70–1.35
 Point of service.84.55–1.28
Region (reference: west)   
 Northeast1.12.84–1.48
 North Central1.15.91–1.47
 South.89.69–1.14
Year of index self-injury (reference: 2008)   
 20091.67.82–3.40
 20102.141.08–4.25
 20111.72.88–3.38
 20122.341.21–4.54
 20132.231.16–4.29
 20142.271.18–4.36
 20151.83.96–3.51
N of unique categories of psychiatric disorder diagnoses in year prior to index self-injury (reference: 0)   
 12.672.12–3.37<.001
 24.023.15–5.14<.001
 36.044.53–8.07<.001
 45.173.11–8.60<.001
 55.191.65–16.35
a
HR, hazard ratio.
b
Values significant at <.001 were also significant at <.0001.
We observed similar trends of when we compared patients who were hospitalized at any time before or after the index self-injury (see tables and figures in online supplement).

Discussion

The primary goals of this research were to understand psychiatric services use and the recurrence of medically treated self-injury for youths over 2 years of consecutive coverage in a commercial claims data set. There were 31,147 encounters for medically treated self-injury during the study period (2008–2015). Of these, 6.5% were admitted to a psychiatric inpatient facility within 7 days of the index self-injury, and 1.7% had a medically treated self-injury in the year after the index self-injury. Similar to past research (30), this analysis of a large nationwide sample demonstrated an increase in visits specifically for medically treated self-injury over the study period. The results of this study indicate that youths who were hospitalized in psychiatric facilities within 7 days of the index self-injury were more likely to be female and to have had a hospitalization in the year prior to their index self-injury.
This study yielded important insights into the opportunities for suicide prevention from medical services. First, in the year prior to the index self-injury, an overwhelming majority of youths were seen in medical settings (94%−96%), whereas a smaller proportion were seen in outpatient psychiatric services (2%−12%). Consistent with prior data highlighting frequent health care contact in the year prior to suicide death (34, 35), this finding suggests that the opportunity for suicide prevention may arise for medical service providers from outside psychiatric services; these professionals need to be aware of suicide risk, provide screening for suicide, and encourage treatment options (36, 37). Estimates of the number of deaths prevented through various suicide prevention strategies suggest that training general practitioners in these activities may significantly decrease the number of lives lost to suicide (36, 38).
Patients in our study who were engaged in outpatient psychiatric treatment received far fewer sessions than would be recommended with a suicide-specific intervention, with an average of seven or eight visits per year. Following hospitalization, use of outpatient psychiatric services increased, with 25% of youths receiving some sort of outpatient treatment, suggesting that inpatient care may be an entree into services but does not necessarily yield higher frequency of service engagement over time. The low level of engagement in psychiatric services highlights the need to make suicide-specific outpatient services more accessible, appealing, and engaging for youths and families. It may be that our current approach to intervening with youths is not “sufficiently effective and sufficiently benign” (36) and that alternative service delivery strategies are needed.
Youths were seen on average two times in the ED each year, indicating that the ED is a common portal for entry into psychiatric services (39). There is an important role for emergency department interventions that are therapeutic and offered to all patients with self-injury, consistent with guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and recommended standard care from the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention; such interventions include assessment, safety planning, lethal-means counseling, and discharge planning (37, 4043). Interventions integrated within emergency services show promise in reducing the burden of suicide, increasing connection to ongoing treatment (44, 45), and providing support during transition from acute to outpatient care (46). We observed a strong positive association between psychiatric hospitalization with 7 days of the index self-injury and future medically treated self-injury, similar to prior work evaluating the impact of hospitalization on suicidal ideation (47). It is important to explore innovations in suicide care delivered on inpatient psychiatric units that can enhance the durability of crisis stabilization and improve patient outcomes over longer intervals.
This study had limitations that need to be acknowledged to contextualize its contribution to the literature. First, the MarketScan data set is limited to commercial insurance plans and does not include public insurance information. The data set also has limited social, economic, clinical, and demographic information, and the analyses were necessarily constrained by that limitation. Administrative data may not have fully captured the spectrum of self-injuries, because many are not medically treated. Geulayov and colleagues (48) observed that suicide deaths and medically treated self-injuries are overt indicators of broader patterns of covert self-injury, including nonsuicidal self-injury. It is important to consider the extent to which our study may have underestimated the larger ecology of self-injurious behavior among adolescents with differing patterns of psychiatric services utilization. Our data were also limited with regard to important metrics of mental illness, such as disease severity, change in symptoms, and response to treatment. In particular, the observed differences may reflect differences in psychiatric illness severity, rather than a direct effect of inpatient psychiatric care upon future risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Second, our inclusion criteria required 2 consecutive years of data in order to provide person-level indicators over time, and thus there may have been a selection bias in the sample for families who have more occupational stability. Finally, although we observed a statistically significant relationship between inpatient hospitalization and subsequent self-injury, we cannot be certain that this is not the result of residual confounding.

Conclusions

Our study represents a large evaluation of service use among youths who were medically treated for a self-injury from 2008 to 2015. The findings support prior research that reported increased numbers of medical and emergency visits for medically treated self-injury among youths. Our study aimed to evaluate individual patterns of care to understand opportunities to augment suicide prevention strategies within the health care system. In this retrospective, observational study examining characteristics of repeated medically treated self-injury, psychiatric hospitalization was strongly associated with recurrence of a medically treated self-injury in the subsequent year. This suggests that hospitalization is utilized for high-risk groups and represents a potent indicator of increased risk of later self-injury.

Supplementary Material

File (appi.ps.201900152.ds001.pdf)

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Information & Authors

Information

Published In

Go to Psychiatric Services
Go to Psychiatric Services
Psychiatric Services
Pages: 447 - 455
PubMed: 31931684

History

Received: 22 March 2019
Revision received: 7 October 2019
Accepted: 31 October 2019
Published online: 14 January 2020
Published in print: May 01, 2020

Keywords

  1. Adolescents/adolescence
  2. Suicide-adolescent

Authors

Details

Molly Adrian, Ph.D. [email protected]
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Adrian) and Department of Radiology (Gold), School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle; Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, Seattle (DeCou).
Christopher DeCou, Ph.D.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Adrian) and Department of Radiology (Gold), School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle; Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, Seattle (DeCou).
Laura S. Gold, Ph.D.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Adrian) and Department of Radiology (Gold), School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle; Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, Seattle (DeCou).

Notes

Send correspondence to Dr. Adrian ([email protected]).

Competing Interests

The authors report no financial relationships with commercial interests.

Funding Information

National Center for Child Health and Developmenthttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100007786: T32HD057822
Agency for Healthcare Research and Qualityhttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000133: K12HS022982
Preparation of this article was supported in part by grant T32HD057822 to Dr. DeCou from the National Institute of Child Health and Development of the National Institutes of Health and by grant K12HS022982 to Dr. Adrian from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

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