JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Suicide has emerged as a serious concern for public health, however, only few studies have revealed the differences between major psychiatric disorders and suicide. Recently, there are attempts to quantify Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) into numeric scores to systematically utilize in computerized methods. The RDoC score was used to reveal the characteristics of major psychiatric disorders and its association with major psychiatric disorders.

Objective:

To investigate the differences in dimensional psychopathology among hospitalized suicidal patients and the association between dimensional psychopathology of psychiatric disorders and length of hospital stay.

Methods:

This retrospective study enrolled hospitalized suicidal patients diagnosed with major psychiatric disorders (depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder) between January 2010 and December 2020 at a tertiary hospital in South Korea. RDoC scores were calculated using patients’ admission notes. To measure the differences between psychiatric disorder cohorts, analysis of variance and the Cochran Q test were used, and post-hoc analysis for RDoC domains was performed with the independent two-sample t-test. A linear regression model was used to analyze the association between RDoC scores and sociodemographic features and comorbidity index. To estimate the association between RDoC scores and length of hospital stay, multiple logistic regression models were applied to each psychiatric disorder group.

Results:

We retrieved 732 admissions for 571 patients (465 with depression, 73 with schizophrenia, and 33 with bipolar disorder). We found significant differences in dimensional psychopathology according to psychiatric disorders. The patient group with depression showed the highest negative RDoC domain scores. In both RDoC cognitive and social domains, the groups with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder scored higher than the group with depression. In the RDoC arousal domain, the depression and bipolar disorder groups scored higher than the group with schizophrenia. We identified significant associations between RDoC scores and length of stay for the depression and bipolar disorder groups. The odds ratio of length of stay were increased by higher RDoC negative domain scores in the group with depression (OR 1.058, 95% CI [1.006–1.114]) and decreased by higher RDoC arousal domain scores in the group with bipolar disorder (OR 0.537, 95% CI [0.285–0.815]).

Conclusions:

This study showed the association between dimensional psychopathology of major psychiatric disorders related to suicide and length of hospital stay and identified differences in dimensional psychopathology of major psychiatric disorders. This may provide new perspectives for understanding suicidal patients.