Cognitive analysis of the social representations of suicide among hospital emergency professionals

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the constitutive contents of the social representations of suicide by health professionals in the emergency department through an analysis of the cognitive network. Method: study based on the Theory of Social Representations carried out with 104 emergency room professionals from a hospital in Bahia, Brazil. A free word association task was conducted using the term suicide enabling the creation of a semantic network that was analyzed using the Cognitive Network Analysis model. Results: this network was composed of 42 vertices (i.e., words evoked by the professionals) and 273 edges (i.e., connections between words), with a mean degree of 13. The representational structure was formed by four dimensions (biological, affective-psychological, social, and religious) that explained the interface between the primary (i.e., central core) terms “despair,” “depression,” “disease,” “sadness,” “death,” “absence of God,” and “family fragility” and the secondary (i.e., periphery) terms “loneliness,” “lack of love,” “weakness,” “emotional distress,” “frustration,” “conflict,” “solution,” “mistake,” “fear,” “non-acceptance,” “anxiety,” “lack of control,” and “kill.” Conclusion: despite the presence of reductionist aspects, the representational structure created by the healthcare professionals of the investigated hospital conveyed the meaning and image of suicide across its multidimensional aspects, favoringchanges in individual and collective practices ...