This scale was originally developed at Columbia University in 2011 (Salvi, 2021). The C-SSRS has been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as many other National Suicide Prevention entities (Brown et al., 2020) to define and stratify suicidal ideation and behavior (Posner et al., 2011). It is widely used today in a multitude of community and healthcare settings, including but not limited to: First response agencies (e.g., police and fire departments), healthcare facilities, military installations, colleges and schools, correction facilities, hospital emergency rooms, in-take clinics, and outpatient settings (Posner et al., 2011).
Clinicians can assess whether a client’s or patient’s suicide risk is low, moderate, or high. The scale is designed to sort ideation and behaviors into four key constructs: severity of ideation, intensity of ideation, behavior, and lethality). These factors are well identified in the literature as predictive of suicide attempts and completions (Brown et al., 2020; Salvi, 2021).
One of the benefits of the C-SSRS is that it has been validated in multiple subpopulations (including children as young as 5, military veterans, and in multi-racial and multi-gender-oriented outpatient clinics) and translated into more than 30 languages.