Inpatient Versus Outpatient Management of Suicide Risk: Clinical and Ethical Considerations Induni Wickramasinghe, Tina Thach, and Lisa M. Brown Contents Standards of Outpatient Care ..................................................................... 3 Standards of Inpatient Care ....................................................................... 4 Identifying Risk Factors to Inform Treatment Decisions ........................................ 5 Determining Imminent Risk .................................................................. 7 Medical and Psychosocial Risk Factors ...................................................... 8 Psychiatric and Medical History .............................................................. 9 Proximal Risk Factors ......................................................................... 9 Psychosocial and Environmental Factors ..................................................... 10 Clinician Factors that May Influence Decision-Making ......................................... 11 Ethical Considerations ............................................................................ 12 Conclusions ....................................................................................... 13 References ........................................................................................ 14 Abstract In the course of treating suicidal patients, clinicians may arrive at a critical decision in which they must evaluate the costs and benefits of various approaches to risk management. Namely, clinicians may need to determine whether an inpatient or an outpatient setting is most appropriate for the management of their patients’ suicidal behaviors. Though many medical and mental health practitioners will face this decision in their professional careers, few are aware of the factors that influence the course of appropriate suicide risk management and patient care. In this chapter, the authors discuss clinical and ethical factors that providers may use to aid clinical decision-making when determining the most appropriate setting for the management and treatment of suicidal patients. I. Wickramasinghe (*) · T. Thach Graduate School of Psychology, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, USA e-mail: iwickramasinghe@paloaltou.edu; tthach@paloaltou.edu L. M. Brown Risk and Resilience Research Lab, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, USA e-mail: lbrown@paloaltou.edu © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Pompili (ed.), Suicide Risk Assessment and Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41319-4_92-1 1