NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Anti-depressant drug treatment is associated with a reduced risk of completed suicides and overall mortality among adults, although it also appears to increase the likelihood of non-fatal suicide attempts, according to a research team in Finland.Despite the numerous studies that have addressed the effects of anti-depressant drug use, the question of how antidepressants affect the risk of suicide remains open, Dr. Jari Tiihonen and colleagues note in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Therefore, Tiihonen, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Kuopio, and his group evaluated the risk between antidepressant use and mortality, based on an analysis of several Finnish databases.

The study group included 15,390 patients who were not psychotic, at least ten years old, and hospitalised after a failed suicide attempt between 1997 and 2003. The authors evaluated treatment with three classes of antidepressant drugs: tricyclic antidepressants (such as Elavil); selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (such as Prozac); and serotonergic-noradrenergic anti-depressants (such as Effexor).