Reflecting on suicide: lessons from my time at Harvard

Extract

More than a year ago I was sat in my room watching an American university professor demonstrating a computerised test on a tablet to one of his interns. His name was Matthew Nock and he was a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a world expert on suicide research. The computerised test was and still is called the Suicide Implicit Association Test (S-IAT) and Professor Nock hoped he was on the brink of a breakthrough in suicide risk prediction research. I was sceptical. How could a brief computerised test predict future suicide attempts better than already known suicide risk factors and the expert opinion of a psychiatrist? It was at this moment that I was convinced that I would have to spend some time in Professor Nock's lab at Harvard in order to get the inside story.