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Jerome A. Motto, MD

JAMA. 1975;234(11):1168-1169.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Beck and his colleagues, in this issue of THE JOURNAL (p 1146), point out that the degree of hopelessness experienced by a depressed patient provides a more accurate indication of suicide risk than does the severity of the patient's depression. The implication of this observation goes beyond the provision of a valuable and relatively simple aid to assessing suicide risk. It raises anew the issue of the role the physician plays in maintaining hope in those patients whose very survival may depend on it.

In the not-so-distant past, before such advances as broad-spectrum antibiotics and open heart surgery, physicians were more often in the role of simply nurturing and maintaining hope, if only in "standing by" during a crisis. They were accorded much esteem for that even though they may have been forced into it by the lack of more specific therapeutic measures. Certainly there was a special message conveyed . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
University of California San Francisco

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