Fig 3. Hypothetical graph that weighs up the net benefit of different interventions in youth mental health settings.

This hypothetical graph weighs up the costs of intervention (i.e. individual and clinician burden) against the number of people we are willing to treat in order to prevent future self-harm. As the costs of intervention increase, naturally the acceptable number of false positives reduce because intervention is likely to result in greater costs than benefits (resulting in a negative net benefit). However, when the costs of intervention are low, a higher number of false positives are acceptable to successfully prevent one case of self-harm (resulting in positive net benefit).