Unravelling psychiatric heterogeneity and predicting suicide attempts in women with trauma-related dissociation using artificial intelligence

Suhas Srinivansan, Nathaniel G. Harnett, Liang Zhang, M. Kathryn Dahlgren, Junbong Jang, Senbao Lu, Benjamin C. Nephew, Cori A. Palermo, Xi Pan, Mohamed Y. Eltabakh, Blaise B. Frederick, Staci A. Gruber, Milissa L. Kaufman, Jean King, Kerry J. Ressler, Sherry Winternitz, Dmitry Korkin*, Lauren A.M. Lebois*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Background: Suicide is a leading cause of death, and rates of attempted suicide have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. The under-diagnosed psychiatric phenotype of dissociation is associated with elevated suicidal self-injury; however, it has largely been left out of attempts to predict and prevent suicide. Objective: We designed an artificial intelligence approach to identify dissociative patients and predict prior suicide attempts in an unbiased, data-driven manner. Method: Participants were 30 controls and 93 treatment-seeking female patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and various levels of dissociation, including some with the PTSD dissociative subtype and some with dissociative identity disorder (DID). Results: Unsupervised learning models identified patients along a spectrum of dissociation. Moreover, supervised learning models accurately predicted prior suicide attempts with an score up to 0.83. DID had the highest risk of prior suicide attempts, and distinct subtypes of dissociation predicted suicide attempts in PTSD and DID. Conclusions: These findings expand our understanding of the dissociative phenotype and underscore the urgent need to assess for dissociation to identify individuals at high-risk of suicidal self-injury.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2143693
Number of pages13
JournalEuropean Journal of Psychotraumatology
Volume13
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Dec 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Artificial intelligence
  • Dissociation
  • Dissociative identity disorder
  • Machine learning
  • Posttraumatic stress disorder
  • Suicidal self-injury
  • Suicide

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