Suicidal behaviour represents a global public health issues; personal suicidal history is the most common predictor of the persistence and recurrence of suicidal ideation and behaviour in general.

This paper proposes to elaborate a synthesis of the scientific literature, concerning the main predictive factors of the persistence and recurrence of suicidal behaviour, considering that the current diagnostic criteria available fail to make a distinction and to specify clearly the differences between all psychiatric disorders without self-harming behaviour and the same nosological entity accompanied by suicidal behaviour.

I conducted a literature review, by analyzing the data concerning the predictors of the persistence and recurrence of self-harming behaviour, obtained from articles published between January 2013 and January 2015. I browsed the PubMed website, by keywords such as suicide, suicidal risk, suicide predictor, persistent suicidal ideation, and suicidal behaviour recurrence.

The scientific literature underscores that that entrapment and defeat are two elements often neglected; however, they should be a priority criterion, alongside traditional predictive factors, such as the following: gender, age, history of suicide attempts, socio-familial status, etc. All of these factors must be considered within the complex endeavour of assessing suicidal risk. However, there is still only scarce validated data concerning the mechanism that leads to entrapment and the one that determines its relation with self-harming behaviour.

This paper proposes to synthesize the current data concerning suicide predictors, in order to obtain new research assumptions. The final purpose is to develop proper preventive and therapeutic approaches.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.