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Essay on Suicide and the Predictions of Suicide

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Suicide and the Predictions of Suicide

In the first paper I read about hopelessness and eventual suicide, four authors studied 207 hospitalized patients with suicidal ideation. There was a follow up period of 5-10 years when these patients were systematically checked up on to see their status. Fourteen eventually completed suicide within the follow up period. In the study the researchers used the Beck Depression Inventory, the Hopelessness Scale, and the Scale of Suicidal Ideation. The only tools that eventually predicted the suicides were the Hopelessness Scale and the pessimism items on the Beck Depression Inventory. This study is to prove the importance of hopelessness as an indicator of …show more content…

Their follow up period was about four years. Eight of the suicide occurred within the first 6 months and the other thirteen within a year. Retrospective studies of suicide have shown that suicide occurs with a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder like depression, schizophrenia, or alcoholism. The authors claim that all except the prospective studies of Beck and Motto have one problem in common and that is that they do not recognize the difference between suicide completers and attempters. Retrospective studies allow for researchers to see the differences between the two groups and therefore eliminating this problem. The limitations of these studies are that no "true" control group can be formed and no description of the psychopathology can be made complete like prospective studies. In this study the sample was 599 patients with uni-polar depression, 175 with bipolar type 1 affective disorder, 92 with bipolar type 2 affective disorder, and 88 with schizoaffective disorder. The number of completed suicides is relatively small which can affect the significance of the findings to other populations. There are a few problems with this study. The prospective set up limits the number of completers available for comparison with the surveying patients and the because they are comparing the completers with the entire sample of

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