Change in voice is first sign of impending suicide — report

"In suicidal patients, the voice becomes slightly hollow and empty, you get a change in quality," Silverman said, quoted in the magazine. "They call it the voice from the grave," he said. He and Mitchell Wilkes, an engineer from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennesse, teamed up to work on a device to help volunteers answering help lines for depressed people.

The British organisation The Samaritans, which runs telephone helplines for the depressed and suicidal, welcomed the plan. "If there’s any way of finding out earlier the level of someone’s risk of suicide, it’D Be a great help," spokeswoman Ema Charvet told the magazine.