Archives of Suicide Research最新文献

Despite the far-reaching impact of suicide on our communities, suicide prevention has historically focused on distally related risk factors for suicidality, which gives us an incomplete picture of how someone comes to make a suicide attempt. Instead, our focus needs to extend to research that explains the maintenance and progression from an emotional state to a suicidal crisis. One such factor, rumination, may create or worsen suicidal thinking by amplifying the distress associated with negative thoughts. Ruminative thoughts are often described as difficult to control, and people may think about suicide as an escape from these uncontrollable thoughts. The current study examined the relationship between severity of lifetime suicidal thinking and certain forms of rumination (i.e., brooding, reflection, anger rumination, and suicidal rumination) in a sample of 145 undergraduate students with suicidal thoughts. For each form of rumination that was related to suicidal thinking, we then examined whether that relationship was accounted for by perceived uncontrollability of one's own thoughts. We found that all forms of rumination were related to severity of lifetime suicidal thinking, as well as heightened perceived inability to control one's own thoughts. This thought control inability helped account for the relationships between brooding, reflection, and anger rumination with severity of suicidal thinking, but did not play a role in the relationship between suicidal rumination and suicidal ideation severity. Clinicians should be aware of the impact ruminative thoughts may have on suicidal thinking. More research needs to be done to replicate and extend these effects.

Adults with clinically significant borderline personality disorder traits (BPTs) are at high risk of experiencing suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). STBs among those with BPTs have been associated with suicidal beliefs (e.g., that one is unlovable or that distress is intolerable). However, the extent to which suicidal beliefs uniquely mediate the relationship between emotional distress and STBs among individuals with BPTs is not known. Individuals admitted to an inpatient unit (N = 198) with recent STBs completed assessments of BPTs, depression, suicidal beliefs, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempt history. Moderated mediation models were used to explore whether suicidal beliefs mediated the relationship between depression and STBs conditional on BPTs. Suicidal patients with versus without BPTs reported stronger suicidal beliefs and more severe STBs (i.e., suicidal ideation, lifetime attempts). Exploratory moderated mediation analysis demonstrated that suicidal beliefs mediated the relationship between depression and suicidal ideation as well as suicide attempts. The mediation effect of suicidal beliefs on the depression-ideation and depression-attempt relationship was not significantly moderated by BPTs. This study was cross-sectional and therefore the estimated mediation models must be considered exploratory. Longitudinal research will be needed to assess the potential causal mediation of suicidal beliefs on the relationship between depression and STBs. The results of this study suggest that suicidal beliefs may play a significant role in the relationship between depression and STBs for inpatients with a history of suicidality regardless of BPTs. This suggests suicidal beliefs may be an important treatment target for adults with a history of STBs.

Objective: Female labor-force participation (FLFP) has been theorized as contributing to higher suicide rates, including among women. Evidence on this relationship, however, has been mixed. This study explored the association between FLFP and suicide in an understudied context, Taiwan, and across 40-years.

Methods: Annual national labor-participation rates for women ages 25-64, and female and male suicide-rates, for 1980-2020, were obtained from Taiwan's Department of Statistics. The associations between FLFP rates and sex/age-stratified suicide-rates, and between FLFP rates and male-to-female suicide-rates ratios were assessed via time-series regression-analyses, accounting for autoregressive effects.

Results: Higher FLFP rates were associated with lower female suicide-rates (ß = -0.06, 95% CI (Credibility Interval) = [-0.19, -0.01]) in the adjusted model. This association held in the age-stratified analyses. Associations for FLFP and lower male suicide-rates were observed in the ≥45 age-groups. FLFP rates were significantly and positively associated with widening male-to-female suicide-rates ratios in the adjusted model (ß = 0.24, 95% CI = [0.03, 0.59]).

Conclusion: This study's findings suggest that FLFP protects women from suicide, and point to the potential value of FLFP as a way of preventing suicide. In Taiwan, employed women carry a double-load of paid and family unpaid care-work. Child care-work is still done by mothers, often with grandmothers' support. Therefore, this study's findings contribute to evidence that doing both paid work and unpaid family care-work has more benefits than costs, including in terms of suicide-protection. Men's disengagement from family care-work may contribute to their high suicide rates, despite their substantial labor-force participation.

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate sex differences in suicide ideation and attempt at different career stages and test hypotheses derived from the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS) in a sample of veterinarians.

Method: The sample of currently practicing veterinarians used for this study (N = 10,319) was derived from a larger sample. Participants completed an online self-report questionnaire.

Results: As predicted, women generally had a higher prevalence of suicide ideation and attempt across career stages, except men and women showed similar rates of suicide attempt after veterinary school. Contrary to hypotheses, no interaction effects between IPTS variables were observed. However, perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and hopelessness exhibited the main effects of suicide ideation, and there were main effects of perceived burdensomeness and hopelessness on suicide attempt. Compared with perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, hopelessness had a relatively more robust relationship with suicide ideation. We also found a significant relationship between fearlessness about death and suicide attempt, but no relationship between self-reported pain tolerance and suicide attempt.

Conclusions: Some of our findings were consistent with the IPTS while others were not. Future research would benefit from a longitudinal examination of suicidality in veterinarians.

Objective: Approximately 17% of adolescents and young adults will engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) at least once in their lifetime, leading the World Health Organization to identify self-injury as one of the top five public health concerns for adolescents. Despite the widespread prevalence of this behavior, NSSI continues to be heavily stigmatized in both medical and community settings, deterring many engaged in NSSI from seeking informal support from friends and family as well as formal psychological or psychiatric treatment. In contrast to the low rates of in-person help-seeking for NSSI, online support groups are highly utilized by those engaged in NSSI. Thus, an empirical study of responses to frequent, voluntary disclosure of NSSI on social media is needed to better understand how these communities meet the needs of those who self-injure.

Method: The current project used latent Dirichlet allocation to identify frequent and favored themes in response to self-injury content in the largest self-injury group on Reddit (over 100,000 members). Reddit, the 9th most visited website in the world, is a chat-based social media platform that has 430+ million active users and billions of site visits, with current estimates suggesting that ∼63% of the U.S. population are Reddit users.

Results: Identified themes included: (1) recovery encouragement; (2) provision of social and instrumental support; and (3) daily realities of living with NSSI. Responses that encouraged recovery received more upvotes on Reddit than any other type of comment.

Conclusion: These results can inform evidence-based, person-centered, dimensional treatments for NSSI.

Objective: The main aim of the current study was to investigate whether SKA2 gene expression in the postmortem brain of rs7208505 genotype are altered in suicide victims from a Mexican population.

Methods: In this study, we report a genetic analysis of expression levels of the SKA2 gene in the prefrontal cortex of the postmortem brain of suicidal subjects (n = 22) compared to subjects who died of causes other than suicide (n = 22) in a Mexican population using RT-qPCR assays. Additionally, we genotyped the rs7208505 polymorphism in suicide victims (n = 98) and controls (n = 88) and we evaluate the association of genotypes for the SNP rs7208505 with expression level of SKA2.

Results: The results showed that the expression of the SKA2 gene was significantly higher in suicide victims compared to control subjects (p = 0.044). Interestingly, we observed a greater proportion of allele A of the rs7208505 in suicide victims than controls. Even though there was no association between the SNP with suicide in the study population we found a significative association of the expression level from SKA2 with the allele A of the rs7208505 and suicide.

Conclusion: The evidence suggests that the expression of SKA2 in the prefrontal cortex may be a critical factor in the etiology of suicidal behavior.