Abstract
This study evaluates the potential value of eudaimonic well-being in assessing pro-preventive orientation towards suicide and recognizing suicide as a solution. The aim was to integrate positive and negative conceptualizations of mental health for predicting attitudes towards suicide, and towards suicide prevention, among students of the helping professions. The study participants (166 women and 73 men, mean age 22.84 ± 5.15) answered a set of questionnaires, including a Questionnaire on Attitudes Towards Suicide, Goldberg Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), Psychological Well-Being Scale (PWB-42) and Centrality of Religiosity Scale. Multiple regression analysis showed that environmental mastery, purpose in life and positive relationships, controlled for religiousness and psychological problems related to general mental health, predicted the variability of attitudes towards suicide and pro-preventive orientation. Sociodemographic variables were not related to attitudes towards suicide. Our findings suggest that positive mental health, represented jointly by low mental health problems and eudaimonic components of happiness, plays a role in predicting pro-preventive attitudes. Therefore, improving positive mental health among students in the helping professions, these being the future gatekeepers, could be considered an auxiliary strategy for suicide prevention.
Highlights
The understanding of suicidal behavior has been recently influenced by concepts originating from positive psychology, which served to synthesize theories organized around the topic of prevention (Barnes 2017; Hirsch et al 2018)
Positive suicidology aims at identifying protective factors for suicidal behavior and examining useful constructs from positive psychology to increase the robustness of suicide prevention (Wingate et al 2006)
No significant relationships were found between attitudes towards suicide (ATS)/ATSP and socioeconomic status (τb = − .04 with suicide as a solution; τb = − .08 with preventability—cognitive; τb = .02 with suicidecomprehensibility and τb = .04 with orientation towards suicide prevention; p > .05) and age (rs = .06 with suicide as a solution; rs = .01 with
Summary
The understanding of suicidal behavior has been recently influenced by concepts originating from positive psychology, which served to synthesize theories organized around the topic of prevention (Barnes 2017; Hirsch et al 2018). Positive suicidology aims at identifying protective factors for suicidal behavior and examining useful constructs from positive psychology to increase the robustness of suicide prevention (Wingate et al 2006). Identifying those at risk is an important goal and suicide prevention is a challenging task faced by the entire community, including groups of gatekeepers. Together, their attitudes towards suicide (ATS), suicide prevention (ATSP) and mental health constitute a personal background that can be brought to the intervention, and as such, merit more research interest within the area of positive suicidology. A study of gatekeeper training for 231 college students by Rallis et al (2018) suggests that this particular population may hold implications for suicide prevention
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