Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie
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Advance planning for health care and research participation has been promoted as a mechanism to retain some control over one's life, and ease substitute decision making, in the event of decisional incapacity. Limited data are available on Canadians' current advance planning activities. We conducted a postal survey to estimate the frequency with which Canadians communicate their preferences about health care and research should they become incapacitated. ⋯ Advance planning has increased over the last 2 decades in Canada. Nonetheless, further efforts are needed to encourage Canadians to voice their health care and research preferences in the event of incapacity. Physicians are well situated to promote advance planning to Canadians.
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To assess whether social supports (proxies) can detect the presence of suicide ideation in a clinical sample of depressed adults 50 years of age or older, and to additionally assess the potential impact of depression symptom severity on patient-proxy concordance in reports of patient suicide ideation. ⋯ Our findings suggest that family and friends can broadly ascertain the presence of suicide ideation in depressed middle-aged and older adults, yet in doing so may largely be responding to their broad perceptions of depressive symptom severity in patients and not specifically to the presence of suicidal thoughts.