Prevention Of Suicidal Behavior Research Articles

Contextual Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Adolescent Suicide Attempts: A Multilevel Investigation.

Multilevel research on whether and how contextual socioeconomic disadvantage affects adolescent suicidal behaviors is scarce. Using data from the first two waves (1994/95 and 1996) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 13,335; 49.63% girls; Mage = 15.02 years), this study examined (1) the association between area-level socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent suicide attempts over and above individual-level socioeconomic factors, (2) the moderating role of gender, and (3) the mediating roles of contextually relevant stressors and available psychosocial resources. The results revealed that area-level socioeconomic disadvantage increased the risk of attempting suicide even after adjusting for individual-level socioeconomic status, especially for boys. Consistent with the stress process perspective, reports of exposure to violence and lack of safety explain this contextual effect. National suicidal behavior prevention strategies across the U.S. should recognize the strong association with the socioeconomic context, along with individual-level risk factors.

Suicide prevention training for Christian faith-based organizations using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: a pilot controlled trial of The HOLLY Program

This study is a pilot controlled trial of The HOLLY Program, an ACT-based suicide prevention gatekeeper training (GKT) program for Christian faith-based organizations (FBOs). Seventy-two participants took part in the study. Mixed ANOVAs with repeated measures examined changes on suicide responding outcomes and ACT processes using pre-intervention and one-month post-intervention data. Based on intention-to-treat analyses, significant increases in self-efficacy and suicide prevention behaviors were found. Increased knowledge and decreased stigma were data trends. No training effects emerged for the ACT processes; however, qualitative analyses showed that participants adaptively used ACT processes when engaging in a self-selected gatekeeper behavior. Further, correlational analyses revealed that ACT processes were associated with decreased stigma and completion of a self-selected gatekeeper behavior. Most participants (86%) awarded maximum ratings to the program's capacity to meet their expectations and needs, whilst 94% stated they would definitely recommend it to others. Although preliminary, these findings indicate the effectiveness of an ACT-based GKT program for Christian FBO members.

Hospitalisations for suicidal behaviour: clinical characteristics and nursing care

Introduction: The care given to people with suicidal behaviour is an important predictor of future death by suicide; however, there is a lack of research on the issue in Brazil. Objective: This study investigated hospitalisations for suicidal behaviour (sociodemographic and clinic characteristics, nursing care and associated factors). Method: Data were collected through manual consultation of medical records of patients admitted in 2015 to a psychiatric emergency unit of a hospital, and analysed using descriptive statistics, Chi-square test and Fisher's exact test. Results: Adult women without a partner, with mood disorder, comorbidities, history of previous suicide attempts and who returned to their own homes predominated among the 127 study cases. The most frequent nursing diagnosis was ‘impaired social interaction’. Age and gender were associated with medical diagnoses. Marital status was associated with medical and nursing diagnoses. Changes in psychosocial assessment were associated with current suicidal ideation, number of attempts, and medical diagnoses. The nursing diagnosis ‘risk of self-directed violence’ was associated with thought disorders and self-harm history. Conclusion: This study contributes to the mapping of factors associated with suicidal behaviour, vulnerabilities and associated factors. It also reflects on the potential of nursing interventions in the care and prevention of suicidal behaviour.

O suicídio como questão de saúde pública

O suicídio como questão de saúde pública

Late-life suicidal behaviours among new users of antidepressants: a prospective population-based study of sociodemographic and gender factors in those aged 75 and above

ObjectiveTo investigate sociodemographic and gender factors associated with suicide and suicide attempts among new users of antidepressants aged 75 and above.DesignRegister-based cohort study.SettingNational population-based cohort of Swedish residents aged ≥75...

Addressing Suicide Risk According to Different Healthcare Professionals in Spain: A Qualitative Study.

This study analyzes the views of four groups of healthcare professionals who may play a role in the management of suicidal behavior. The goal was to identify key factors for suicide prevention in different areas of the healthcare system. Qualitative research was conducted using focus groups made up of different healthcare professionals who participated in the identification, management, and prevention of suicidal behavior. Professionals included were primary care physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and emergency physicians. ‘Suicide’ was amongst the most relevant terms that came up in discussions most of the times it appeared associated with words such as ‘risk’, danger’, or ‘harm’. In the analysis by categories, the four groups of professionals agreed that interventions in at-risk behaviors are first in importance. Prevention was the second main concern with greater significance among psychiatrists. Primary care professionals call for more time to address patients at risk for suicide and easier access to and communication with the mental health network. Emergency care professionals have a lack of awareness of their role in the detection of risk for suicide in patients who seek attention at emergency care facilities for reasons of general somatic issues. Mental health care professionals are in high demand in cases of self-harm, but they would like to receive specific training in dealing with suicidal behavior.

Social cognition and short-term prediction of suicidal ideation in schizophrenia

Despite recent research acknowledging social cognition as an important feature of interpersonal functioning in schizophrenia, little work has evaluated the role of social cognition in suicidal ideation and behavior in psychosis. In a short-term longitudinal study, we evaluated the association between concurrent and near term suicidal ideation with social cognition, including emotion recognition and related biases (ER-40; BLERT), attribution biases (AIHQ), and evaluations of trustworthiness (trustworthiness task) in a sample of 179 outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Adjusting for severity of positive and general mental health symptoms, greater reactivity to extreme stimuli (trustworthiness measure), BLERT negative affect accuracy, and AIHQ Blame Scores were associated with suicidal ideation at baseline. AIHQ Blame Scores also longitudinally predicted the presence of ideation 2 weeks later and were highest among participants with ideation across the two time points. The present findings provide support that biased interpretations, and, concurrently with ideation, reactivity and selective accuracy to negative stimuli, are associated with suicidal ideation in schizophrenia. Further understanding the role of social cognitive ability and biases on suicidal ideation could contribute to the understanding of social cognition as a treatment target in prevention of suicidal behavior in schizophrenia.

Analysis of the opinions of adolescents on the risk factors of suicide.

The aim of this paper was to identify the opinions of adolescents aged 16-19, attending public high schools in Warsaw, on the risk factors of suicide. The study group consisted of adolescents who were aged 16-19 in the year 2015 (M = 17.29; SD = 0.94). The respondents attended eight public high schools in Warsaw, from eight different districts of the city. The study group was representative. 1,439 respondents participated in the study -821 girls (57.1%) and 592 boys (41.1%). PAPI method was used in the conducted study. The questionnaire consisted of 34 questions divided into three sections - concerning epidemiology, risk factors and prevention of suicidal behaviors. According to 37.0% of respondents, the main problem occurring in a family that could become a risk factor in committing suicide is lack of understanding from the parents. The respondents indicated that conflicts between peers are school-related situations that could be the source of suicidal thoughts (48.6%). More than half of respondents (59.1%) believed that being rejected by close and important persons was the main factor related to the feeling of loneliness that could contribute to a suicidal act. 1) An important element in the prevention of self-destructive behaviors of young people should be parental training in understanding and accepting their children. 2) Itis advisable to conduct classes developing psycho-social skills of adolescents, in particular their ability to solve interpersonal problems, in order to reduce the number of conflicts with peers that occur in the school environment.

Sanat-pedagojik aktivite temelinde çocukların intihar davranışlarının önlenmesi

The content of art and educational activities in the prevention of abnormal domains in society are identified by the authors on the basis of survey results after piloting the art- pedagogical session. By analyzing the questionnaire data the authors argue that the establishment of creativity contributes to promotion of individual in society, the development of all the senses, memory, perception, will, imagination, intuition, and stress relief, increase of emotional tone, confidence, and positive attitude. Thus, the potential of art-pedagogy and art-therapy in the context of the prevention of suicidal behavior and related domains is large enough that the application of appropriate techniques in mass primary education and upbringing largely predetermines the solution of the problem of early prevention of suicidal tendencies of young people.

Extracting psychiatric stressors for suicide from social media using deep learning

BackgroundSuicide has been one of the leading causes of deaths in the United States. One major cause of suicide is psychiatric stressors. The detection of psychiatric stressors in an at risk population will facilitate the early prevention of suicidal behaviors and suicide. In recent years, the widespread popularity and real-time information sharing flow of social media allow potential early intervention in a large-scale population. However, few automated approaches have been proposed to extract psychiatric stressors from Twitter. The goal of this study was to investigate techniques for recognizing suicide related psychiatric stressors from Twitter using deep learning based methods and transfer learning strategy which leverages an existing annotation dataset from clinical text.MethodsFirst, a dataset of suicide-related tweets was collected from Twitter streaming data with a multiple-step pipeline including keyword-based retrieving, filtering and further refining using an automated binary classifier. Specifically, a convolutional neural networks (CNN) based algorithm was used to build the binary classifier. Next, psychiatric stressors were annotated in the suicide-related tweets. The stressor recognition problem is conceptualized as a typical named entity recognition (NER) task and tackled using recurrent neural networks (RNN) based methods. Moreover, to reduce the annotation cost and improve the performance, transfer learning strategy was adopted by leveraging existing annotation from clinical text.Results & conclusionsTo our best knowledge, this is the first effort to extract psychiatric stressors from Twitter data using deep learning based approaches. Comparison to traditional machine learning algorithms shows the superiority of deep learning based approaches. CNN is leading the performance at identifying suicide-related tweets with a precision of 78% and an F-1 measure of 83%, outperforming Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extra Trees (ET), etc. RNN based psychiatric stressors recognition obtains the best F-1 measure of 53.25% by exact match and 67.94% by inexact match, outperforming Conditional Random Fields (CRF). Moreover, transfer learning from clinical notes for the Twitter corpus outperforms the training with Twitter corpus only with an F-1 measure of 54.9% by exact match. The results indicate the advantages of deep learning based methods for the automated stressors recognition from social media.

Mental Health Challenges in Students: A Futuristic View on Depression and Suicidal Behaviors

Aim and Background: In recent years, university students' mental health issues have attracted much attention in scientific societies, and many studies have been carried out to improve the mental health of the student population. Depression and suicidal behaviors are among the common problems of mental health in university students. Evidence shows that these problems, in combination with each other, carry a large amount of physical, psychological, social, political and economic costs to the society. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the issues of prevalence, pathology, diagnosis, consequences, prevention and treatment of depressive disorder and suicidal behaviors in this society.

A Systematic Literature Review of Technologies for Suicidal Behavior Prevention.

Suicide is the second cause of death in young people. The use of technologies as tools facilitates the detection of individuals at risk of suicide thus allowing early intervention and efficacy. Suicide can be prevented in many cases. Technology can help people at risk of suicide and their families. It could prevent situations of risk of suicide with the technological evolution that is increasing. This work is a systematic review of research papers published in the last ten years on technology for suicide prevention. In September 2017, the consultation was carried out in the scientific databases PubMed, ScienceDirect, PsycINFO, The Cochrane Library and Google Scholar. A general search was conducted with the terms "prevention" AND "suicide" AND "technology. More specific searches included technologies such as "Web", "mobile", "social networks", and others terms related to technologies. The number of articles found following the methodology proposed was 90, but only 30 are focused on the objective of this work. Most of them were Web technologies (51.61%), mobile solutions (22.58%), social networks (12.90%), machine learning (3.23%) and other technologies (9.68%). According to the results obtained, although there are technological solutions that help the prevention of suicide, much remains to be done in this field. Collaboration among technologists, psychiatrists, patients, and family members is key to advancing the development of new technology-based solutions that can help save lives.

Brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and suicidal behavior: A review of studies from Asian countries.

The biological basis of suicide and suicidal behavior is actively researched. Recently, the role of Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor (BDNF) in suicidal behavior has gained attention and significant results are observed. In this review, we aimed to focus on the studies from Asian countries that have explored the role of BDNF and suicidal behavior. The review highlights the findings from these studies and discusses the possible avenues that should be explored in future studies from Asian countries to understand more on suicidal behavior and possible prevention.

Benchmarking the "Question, Persuade, Refer" Program Against Evaluations of Established Suicide Prevention Gatekeeper Trainings.

Gatekeeper training is a common approach for aiding suicidal youth. This study utilizes comparative effectiveness "benchmarks" from established programs to evaluate the Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) program. The QPR program was implemented with adults (N=2,389) working in youth-serving community agencies. Questionnaires assessed suicide prevention knowledge, attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and behaviors. Consistent with benchmarked studies, participants in QPR demonstrated knowledge and suicide prevention behavior gains compared with control groups. Future research should utilize benchmarking methods as a measure of effectiveness, and more thoroughly assess mechanisms that promote behavior change.

Identification of adverse childhood experiences strongly predicting suicidal behaviour among emerging adults in Montenegro and Romania: a new way to targeted cost-effective prevention.

Aiming at generating evidence for cost-effective public health (PH) interventions for suicidal behaviour (SB) prevention in South Eastern Europe, the objective was to identify adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) most strongly predicting SB in emerging adults. Survey data of 3283 students aged 18-29 from Montenegro and Romania were analysed by logistic regression. Based on estimation of risk-for-SB, the profiles with the highest values were identified. The SB odds were the highest in respondents, experienced a suicide attempt in the household (OR: 13.81; p < 0.001), and whose primary family was not complete, in particular in those with the foster family background (OR: 18.30; p = 0.001). Magnitude of impact on emerging adults' mental health vulnerability tends to vary considerably with individual ACEs. This should be considered carefully when developing cost-effective response to SB burden through PH interventions in particular at the times of financial crises and in scarce resources settings.

Characteristics of personality and psychological aspects of suicidal behavior prevention in medical students

To study the formation and dynamics of development of suicidal behavior (SB) in medical students based on a personality/psychological approach. Two hundred and seventy-two students with- (n=75) and without SB (n=197) were examined. Psychopathological and psychological methods, and several questionnaires and scales were used. Personality and environmental characteristics as well as family loading were the leading factors of SB formation. Based on the results obtained, the authors developed a complex of preventive measures in the frames of three types of prevention (common, selective and indicative).

Retrospective Study of Relationship Between Alcohol Use and Risk of Suicide Attempt

Background: It is important to investigate the relationship between alcohol use and risk of suicide attempt which has important implications for management and prevention of further suicidal behavior. Methods: One year’s worth of data (June 2014 to May 2015) was obtained retrospectively from case records of patients who had attempted suicide. Results: In the year sampled, there were 1600 attempted suicide cases, of which 809 were referred to a psychiatrist for a risk-factor evaluation. Males were 397 (49.1%), out of which 147 patients were found to be using alcohol. Out of 147 patients 146 (99.3%) suicide attempt were linked to alcohol use. Those who age &lt;30 years were 83(56.5%) and age &gt;30 years were 64 (43.5%). 60 (40.8%) were using alcohol from less than 5years, 43(29.3%) were using alcohol from 5-10 years, 44(29.9%) were using alcohol for more than 10 years. 120(81.6%) had dependence pattern of alcohol use, 109(74.1%) were under intoxication, where as 18(12.2%) were in withdrawal state at the time of suicide attempt, 105 (71.4%) were attempted suicide without their awareness. and 83(56.5%) were having alcohol induced depression. Conclusion: This study from the case records elucidates relationship between alcohol use and suicide attempt which will help further in suicide prevention.

Психологическая компетентность сотрудников органов внутренних дел при профилактике суицидальных рисков в служебной деятельности

The article considers the signs of suicidal behavior of a person. Based on a survey of law enforcement officers in which they provide self-assessment of knowledge about the signs of suicide, as well as the possibilities and nature of applying this knowledge to suicides, it is concluded that it is necessary to train internal affairs officials in the prevention of suicidal behavior. Based on the analysis of the results of the study, it was concluded that it is necessary to improve and systematize the knowledge of employees of the internal affairs agencies on suicidal behavior of the individual, and also to conduct educational work in this direction.

Association between alcohol abuse, childhood adverse events and suicide

Background: Negative life events present a risk for suicidal behaviour. The occurrence of suicidal behaviour also depends on type of negative life events, time of their appearance and the support person has in their environment, and can be part of a process triggered by a stressful event. the aim of the study was to investigate adverse childhood events, parental alcoholism and alcohol abuse in association with suicidal behaviour of suicide victims.Methods: A case-control study was conducted involving 90 individuals from Slovenian population who committed suicide and 90 age-sex matched controls drawn from the living population. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews with key informants by the principles of psychological autopsy.Results: Alcohol abuse was reported more ofen for suicide victims than for controls. The same was true for severe deprivation in childhood and alcoholism of one or both parents. Differences between groups in separation from one or both parents, death of one or both parents, reported parental divorce in childhood or sexual abuse in childhood were not observed.Conclusions: We should conclude that negative events in childhood and alcohol abuse in adulthood of suicide victims could be related to suicidal behaviour in population with higher suicide rate. When planning measures for the prevention of suicidal behaviour, adverse events in childhood and alcohol abuse should not be neglected to plan measures to prevent such events accordingly and to raise awareness about the dangers of alcohol abuse for suicidal behaviour.

Annual Research Review: Suicide among youth - epidemiology, (potential) etiology, and treatment.

Suicide is a leading cause of death and a complex clinical outcome. Here, we summarize the current state of research pertaining to suicidal thoughts and behaviors in youth. We review their definitions/measurement and phenomenology, epidemiology, potential etiological mechanisms, and psychological treatment and prevention efforts. We identify key patterns and gaps in knowledge that should guide future work. Regarding epidemiology, the prevalence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among youth varies across countries and sociodemographic populations. Despite this, studies are rarely conducted cross-nationally and do not uniformly account for high-risk populations. Regarding etiology, the majority of risk factors have been identified within the realm of environmental and psychological factors (notably negative affect-related processes), and most frequently using self-report measures. Little research has spanned across additional units of analyses including behavior, physiology, molecules, cells, and genes. Finally, there has been growing evidence in support of select psychotherapeutic treatment and prevention strategies, and preliminary evidence for technology-based interventions. There is much work to be done to better understand suicidal thoughts and behaviors among youth. We strongly encourage future research to: (1) continue improving the conceptualization and operationalization of suicidal thoughts and behaviors; (2) improve etiological understanding by focusing on individual (preferably malleable) mechanisms; (3) improve etiological understanding also by integrating findings across multiple units of analyses and developing short-term prediction models; (4) demonstrate greater developmental sensitivity overall; and (5) account for diverse high-risk populations via sampling and reporting of sample characteristics. These serve as initial steps to improve the scientific approach, knowledge base, and ultimately prevention of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among youth.