While research has made great strides in identifying risk factors for suicidality, close analysis of the literature suggests that most of these risk factors fail in an important respect: they do not help identify which suicide ideators are at greatest risk for progressing to a suicide attempt. This is a crucial issue since most people who ideate (have suicidal thoughts) do not actually make a suicide attempt. Data from both the National Comorbidity Study and its replication help illustrate this limitation. In these studies, the presence of each Axis I disorder robustly differentiated suicide ideators from non-suicidal controls and suicide attempters from controls, but negligibly differentiated suicide attempters from suicide ideators