Suicide Attempters’ Memory Traces of Exposure to Suicidal Behavior
A Qualitative Pilot Study
Abstract
Background: In the course of their lives individuals may encounter the phenomenon of suicide in various ways, for example, directly through suicidal behavior in the family or among peers; or indirectly through hearsay, the media, literature, etc. Aims: The study investigates such memory traces (engrams) in patients with and without a suicide attempt. Methods: Ten patients from a psychiatric crisis unit who had attempted suicide and ten patients without a history of suicidal behavior were interviewed with a narrative/semistructured interviewing technique. Interviews were video-recorded and fully transcribed. Stepwise reduction of the content was used to develop categories of recurrent memories and models of suicidal behavior. Results: Suicide attempters reported more memories of direct exposure to suicidal behavior (e.g., witnessing a suicidal act) than did patients who had no history of attempted suicide. They also reported more own suicidal crises, but associated them more often with interpersonal problems than with depression. They considered suicide more often as normal behavior than nonattempters. The total number of suicide-related memories and their origins was remarkably similar in both groups. Conclusions: The results suggest that direct exposure to suicidal behavior may leave engrams (memory traces) that increase an individual’s susceptibility to suicidal behavior.
References
2004). “What’s the story?” Working with narrative in experiential psychotherapy. In , The handbook of narrative psychotherapy (pp. 87–101). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
(1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
(1986). Social foundations of thought and action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
(2000). Coded semistructured interviews in social psychological research. In , Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 286–312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1996). Beyond belief: A theory of modes, personality, and psychopathology. In , Frontiers of cognitive therapy (pp. 1–25). New York: Guilford.
(1961). An inventory for measuring depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 4, 561–571.
(1997). Suicidal behavior among children in Europe. Proceedings of the World Federation for Mental Health Congress, Lahti.
(2002). Exposure to suicide: Incidence and association with suicidal ideation and behavior: United States, 1994. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 32, 321–328.
(2005). Lifetime risk of suicide ideation and attempts in an Australian community: Prevalence, suicidal process, and help-seeking behavior. Journal of Affective Disorders, 86, 215–224.
(2004). Who are the kids who self-harm? An Australian self-report school survey. Medical Journal of Australia, 181, 140–144.
(2008). Social modeling in the transmission of suicidality. Crisis, 29, 11–19.
(2007). Suicidal ideation among Viennese high school students. Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, 119, 174–180.
(1996). Test-retest reliability of the suicide opinion questionnaire. Psychological Reports, 78, 1009–1010.
(2004). Rites of passage of the engram: Reconsolidation and the lingering consolidation hypothesis. Neuron, 44(1), 93–100.
(2008). Cultural considerations in adolescent suicide prevention and psychosocial treatment. American Psychologist, 63(1), 14–31.
(1998). Commentary: Grounded theory and the constant comparative method. British Medical Journal, 316, 1060–1064.
(1996). Adolescent attitudes about death in relation to suicidality. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 26, 8–18.
(1991). The Beck Depression Inventory in clinical practice. Nervenarzt, 62, 689–696.
(1994). Beck-Depressions-Inventar (BDI) [
(Beck Depression Inventory ]. Bern: Huber.2007). Imagery about suicide in depression – “Flash-forward”? Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 38, 423–434.
(1890). Principles of psychology. New York: Holt.
(1999). Prevalence of and risk factors for lifetime suicide attempts in the National Comorbidity Survey. Archives of General Psychiatry, 56, 617–626.
(1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, 159–174.
(2006). Cultural diversity and suicide: Ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual orientation perspectives. New York: The Haworth.
(1981). Pathways to suicide: A survey of self-destructive behaviors. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
(2003). Risk of suicide ideation associated with problem-solving ability and attitudes toward suicidal behavior in university students. Crisis, 24, 160–167.
(2000). Strategic and automatic processes in prospective memory retrieval: A multiprocess framework. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14(7), 127–144.
(2007). Familial pathways to early-onset suicidal behavior: Familial and individual antecedents of suicidal behavior. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164, 1364–1370.
(2001). Is suicide contagious? A study of the relation between exposure to suicidal behavior of others and nearly lethal suicide attempts. American Journal of Epidemiology, 154, 120–127.
(1997). Suicide as goal-directed action. Archives of Suicide Research, 3, 213–221.
(1994). Understanding deliberate self-harm: The patient’s views. Crisis, 15, 172–178.
(2009). The influence of death exposure on suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Archives of Suicide Research, 13, 136–146.
(1992). Parasuicide in Europe: The WHO/EURO multicenter study on parasuicide. I. Introduction and preliminary analysis for 1989. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 85, 97–104.
(1998). Problem solving and suicidal behavior. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 28, 375–387.
(2001). Treating suicidal behavior. New York: Guilford.
(1996). Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past. New York: Basic Books.
(2007). Remembering the past to imagine the future: The prospective brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 657–661.
(2000). Content analysis and narrative analysis. In , Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 313–335). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1998). The association between attitudes toward suicide and suicidal ideation in adolescents. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 97, 195–201.
(1987). Qualitative analysis for social scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1988). Emotional disturbance and the specificity of autobiographical memory. Cognition and Emotion, 2, 221–234.
(2004). Media influences on suicidal behavior: An interview study of young people. Behavioral and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 32(2), 189–198.
(