Artificial Intelligence Can Now Predict Suicide With Remarkable Accuracy (qz.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and his colleagues have created machine-learning algorithms that predict, with unnerving accuracy, the likelihood that a patient will attempt suicide. In trials, results have been 80-90% accurate when predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next two years, and 92% accurate in predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next week. The prediction is based on data that's widely available from all hospital admissions, including age, gender, zip codes, medications, and prior diagnoses. Walsh and his team gathered data on 5,167 patients from Vanderbilt University Medical Center that had been admitted with signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation. They read each of these cases to identify the 3,250 instances of suicide attempts. This set of more than 5,000 cases was used to train the machine to identify those at risk of attempted suicide compared to those who committed self-harm but showed no evidence of suicidal intent.

Comments

Falso positives and negatives calculation

[houghi]

So who can do the calculations for the false postives and the false negatives? Because I am sure that this will calculate that I am willing to kill myself, even if I have no desire to do so and tell me that I won't when I am willing to do so.

No, please.

[SCVonSteroids]

As someone who's been down that road (but never gone through with an attempt), I automatically hate this invention. When depressed to that point, emotions tend to swing so hard and so fast that any mention of predictions during this state of mind is utmost bullshit.

The very slightest of triggers can either send you overboard or keep you in one piece depending on how your inner conversation is going with yourself. This can be anything... a faint sound, perhaps a song that reminds you of good/shitty times, from a car passing by not too far away.

I consider myself lucky to be both scared of the afterlife enough to have thoughts force second-guessings into me (although the older I grow the less I care), and have enough positive triggers to bring myself back. Nobody, not even myself, could predict if these will always work for me as well as they have however.

Suicidal/depressive folks definitely need help, but not from the machines of this day and age. A positive trigger could well be overridden by a "fuck it", and it only takes a split second to follow through the act. You can't predict that kind of stuff with a high degree of accuracy, at least not yet.

Disclaimer : I did not RTFA. I find stuff like this appalling as it hits me right in the feels and I would be deeply insulted if a machine tried to guess whether I was going to kill myself or not. There's much more to it than some algorithms a team engineers wrote.