Dose-response association between psychological distress and risk of completed suicide in the general population

Elevated suicide rates in people with clinical depression, as indexed by hospitalizations or use of psychiatric outpatient services, are well documented.1 However, the association between depression across the full range of severity and subsequent suicide risk is unknown. With single-cohort studies insufficiently powered to examine this relation, to our knowledge, we provide the first pooling of individual-level data from a series of large general population–based cohort studies.