With many teenagers suffering from undiagnosed mental illness, experts have recommended screening kids for risk of suicide. But some worry that just asking kids questions about suicide will get them thinking about killing themselves. Researchers in New York recently carried out the first-ever study on whether suicide screening increases the risk of suicide.

What the researchers wanted to know: Does asking high schoolers about suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts make them think more about suicide?

What they did: At six high schools in Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties in New York, classes were randomly assigned to two halves of the experiment. On the first day of screening, all of the kids took a baseline set of surveys, which included questions about drug use, mood, and depression. In classes that had been put in the experimental group, the students also completed surveys on suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. Those surveys were left out for the other classes (the control group). Before and after that set of surveys, the teenagers filled out a survey that measured their mood "right now," to look at whether taking the surveys changed their moods. Two days later, they filled out the immediate mood survey again, plus another set of surveys on depression, mood, and suicide.

What they found: Kids who answered questions about suicide weren't any worse off than kids who hadn't seen those questions. Their mood immediately after filling out the survey and two days later wasn't measurably worse. The researchers also looked at kids who might be at higher risk because they were depressed, used drugs or alcohol, or had attempted suicide before, and found the same was true. In fact, depressed kids were slightly less distressed–and kids who'd attempted suicide before were less likely to think about suicide–after the survey if they'd been asked about suicide than if they hadn't.

What the study means to you: The fears about suicide screening weren't totally irrational. For example, other research has found that media reports of suicides encourage suicide attempts. But these results suggest that screen surveys are fundamentally different from the evening news and that asking kids about suicide doesn't make them more prone to trying it. Indeed, the results imply that asking high-risk kids about suicide might even calm them somewhat.

Caveats: The kids were mostly white and drawn from suburban schools, so the results don't necessarily apply to kids from more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse urban schools.

Find out more: Columbia University's TeenScreen program works on screening teens for mental illness and suicide risk.

Read the article: Gould, M.S. et al. "Evaluating Iatrogenic Risk of Youth Suicide Screening Programs." Journal of the American Medical Association. April 6, 2005, Vol. 293, No. 13, pp. 1635–1643.

Abstract online: http://jama.ama-assn.org