4) the presence and degree of hopelessness (on a 0–100 point scale) in the 14 days prior to death was assessed. The inter-rater reliability for this version of the SCID has been reported previously (Phillips et al., 2002); the intra-class correlations coefficients for affective disorders, substance abuse, psychotic disorders and other mental disorders were respectively 0.87, 0.94, 0.83 and 0.71.