Mental health courts cause suicides

"More than a third of all male cases had a criminal justice history, but relative risk against the general population was higher for women than men. Independent effects linked with criminal justice exposure persisted with confounder adjustment. Suicide risk was markedly elevated with custodial sentencing, but the strongest effects were with sentencing to psychiatric treatment and with charges conditionally withdrawn."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21300938

I read the abstract, please could you direct me to the full paper? Also in particular where mental health courts are linked as a causative factor to suicides? I would be quite interested, as a lawyer, if this is indeed the case, as it is often lawyers who argue against the psychs where treatment and or detention orders infringe on individual rights. Thus if mental health courts cause suicides we need to be even more careful in arguing against medical opinion. The only conclusion I can draw from your quote is people are more likely to commit suicide if they have mental health problems or if they are incarcerated, which would make sense. I also note the study is Danish. They have a very good system in Denmark but I wonder whether Danish results can be reliable on an international scale. The study seems to support better treatment and access to resurces within the Danish CJS which would seem to be a noble aim would it not?

I was about to sign off, I can track down the paper later but have you seen this one ?

The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder

"The selling of bipolar disorder stresses that the disorder takes a fearsome toll of suicides...

Yet, the best available evidence shows that unmedicated patients with bipolar disorder do not have a higher risk of suicide.

Storosum and colleagues analyzed all placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trials of mood stabilizers for the prevention of manic/depressive episode that were part of a registration dossier submitted to the regulatory authority of the Netherlands, the Medicines Evaluation Board, between 1997 and 2003 [28]. They found four such prophylaxis trials. They compared suicide risk in patients on placebo compared with patients on active medication. Two suicides (493/100,000 person- years of exposure) and eight suicide attempts (1,969/100,000 person-years of exposure) occurred in the group given an active drug (943 patients), but no suicides and two suicide attempts (1,467/100,000 person-years of exposure) occurred in the placebo group (418 patients). Based on these absolute numbers from these four trials, I have calculated (see Figure S1 showing calculation, and see Figure 2) that active agents are most likely to be associated with a 2.22 times greater risk of suicidal acts than placebo (95% CI 0.5, 10.00). "

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030185