Fig 3. Characteristics of suicide planning among participants who attempted suicide and either endorsed a single-item plan or did not.

For those that endorsed a single-item lifetime suicide plan (blue) and for those that denied a single-item lifetime suicide plan (red), the distributions of (A) the amount of time between thinking of the method and attempting suicide, (B) the decision to attempt and attempting suicide and (C) thinking of place to attempt suicide and attempting suicide and (D) the percentage of participants that made any preparatory actions and the mean number of preparatory actions prior to a suicide attempt. If participants interpreted a “suicide plan” similarly, one would expect minimal overlap between distributions of planning characteristics for single-item “planners” and “non-planners.” Instead, each of the distributions overlap substantially (71–92%) using the bins in the current plot, suggesting participants do not reliably interpret the single-item suicide planning question.