Unconscious Thoughts May Help Prevent Suicide

The aftermath of suicide is dark time of confusion and questions for the survivors.  Wondering if they could have something to prevent the death or if they missed a warning sign of the impending doom, suicide leaves many unanswered questions and lingering doubt in the minds of those left behind.

In the hope of identifying a common precursor to suicide, researchers have searched for years with little success for tool that might predict a person’s likelihood of taking his own life.  Recently, scientists attempted to revamp a decade-old psychological assessment tool for the purposes of predicting suicide, and the results were remarkably successful.

In an unprecedented project, psychological research scientists Matthew Nock and Mahzarin Banaji, with colleagues at both Harvard and nearby Massachusetts General Hospital, utilized the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, in such a way that that they were hopeful that it might prove useful in predicting, and thus preventing, suicidal behavior.

The Implicit Association Test is a rapid-response, reaction time testing tool that requires responders to quickly classify words on a computer screen.  Testing 157 patients, all of whom were emotionally distressed but only some of whom had attempted suicide, in a psychiatric emergency room, the researchers assessed the patients using the IAT.  The patients were asked to classify words that dealt with either death or life, such as lifeless, thrive, deceased, survive, breathing, myself.  The goal of the assessments was to see if the IAT could distinguish between patients who had attempted suicide and those who had not.

The IAT assessments revealed that patients who had attempted suicide prior to admission to the psychiatric emergency room displayed much stronger links between death and self than did patients that were in the facility for other issues of emotional distress.

Researchers followed all of the test subjects for six months and monitored their emotional health.  It was determined that those patients with the strongest death and self associations had a six-fold increase in later suicide attempts.  In all, fourteen of the emergency room patients attempted suicide within six months of leaving the facility, and their IAT scores did indeed predict a tendency toward suicidal behavior.

These results indicate the reliability of suicidal thoughts, even thoughts of which the patient is unaware, in the prediction of suicide, and support the accuracy of the Implicit Association Test in its ability to identify thought patterns that may indicate suicidal tendencies.