Neuroscience
Suicidal thoughts are relatively common whereas acts of suicide are, thankfully, far more rare. But this creates a dilemma – how to judge the risk of thoughts turning into action? A new study claims that an objective way is to use a computer programme to analyse a person's writing style. People who are having suicidal thoughts and who use more pronouns relating to the self (I, me, myself) than pronouns relating to others, are likely to take more time to recover, meaning they will be at risk for longer.
Mira Brancu and her colleagues investigated 114 US students who'd referred themselves to an outpatient counselling centre at their university, and all of whom said they were having suicidal thoughts. When the students started therapy they completed a measure of suicidal risk which involved them writing about what they found most painful, pressing, agitating, and if and why they felt hopeless and self-hating. They also wrote about their reasons for living and dying and about "one thing that would help me no longer feel suicidal".
A computer programme analysed the students' answers to these questions, counting the relative number of mentions of first-person pronouns compared with mentions of other people, including friends and family and people's names. Based on this, the students were categorised as either self-focused or other-focused. The important finding was that this categorisation was related to how the students progressed through therapy, based on their session-by-session self-ratings of their frequency of suicidal thoughts and their assessment of their own suicide risk. Students who were more self-focused at the study start took longer to recover – their suicidal thoughts resolved, on average, in 17 to 18 sessions, compared with 6 to 7 sessions for the students who were categorised as other-focused.
This finding does build on past research linking first-person pronoun use with personal distress, but as a diagnostic tool for suicidal risk it definitely needs replicating in other contexts – these were students who'd self-referred for treatment and all of them recovered, so it's not clear whether the same results would apply with other, potentially more at-risk groups (but note, a prior study of suicidal poets [pdf] found that those who used more first-person pronouns were more likely to die by suicide).
Despite its limitations, this is an intriguing result that shows the possibility of a relatively quick, efficient and objective way to estimate the likely persistence of suicidal thoughts. The measure would be "bias-free" which is important because it's known that clinicians' own subjective judgments can be off-target. Indeed, Brancu and her colleagues note that an informal survey of clinicians at conferences found that they thought more self-focused versus other-focused writings would be a positive sign, indicating that patients were better able to articulate their feelings.
_________________________________
Brancu, M., Jobes, D., Wagner, B., Greene, J., & Fratto, T. (2015). Are There Linguistic Markers of Suicidal Writing That Can Predict the Course of Treatment? A Repeated Measures Longitudinal Analysis Archives of Suicide Research DOI: 10.1080/13811118.2015.1040935
--further reading--
Greater use of "I" and "me" as a mark of interpersonal distress
What's different about those who attempt suicide rather than just thinking about it?
A study of suicide notes left by children and young teens
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Our free fortnightly email will keep you up-to-date with all the psychology research we digest: Sign up!
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Neuroscience
What does a person's writing style say about their risk of suicide?
Suicidal thoughts are relatively common whereas acts of suicide are, thankfully, far more rare. But this creates a dilemma – how to judge the risk of thoughts turning into action? A new study claims that an objective way is to use a computer programme to analyse a person's writing style. People who are having suicidal thoughts and who use more pronouns relating to the self (I, me, myself) than pronouns relating to others, are likely to take more time to recover, meaning they will be at risk for longer.
Mira Brancu and her colleagues investigated 114 US students who'd referred themselves to an outpatient counselling centre at their university, and all of whom said they were having suicidal thoughts. When the students started therapy they completed a measure of suicidal risk which involved them writing about what they found most painful, pressing, agitating, and if and why they felt hopeless and self-hating. They also wrote about their reasons for living and dying and about "one thing that would help me no longer feel suicidal".
A computer programme analysed the students' answers to these questions, counting the relative number of mentions of first-person pronouns compared with mentions of other people, including friends and family and people's names. Based on this, the students were categorised as either self-focused or other-focused. The important finding was that this categorisation was related to how the students progressed through therapy, based on their session-by-session self-ratings of their frequency of suicidal thoughts and their assessment of their own suicide risk. Students who were more self-focused at the study start took longer to recover – their suicidal thoughts resolved, on average, in 17 to 18 sessions, compared with 6 to 7 sessions for the students who were categorised as other-focused.
This finding does build on past research linking first-person pronoun use with personal distress, but as a diagnostic tool for suicidal risk it definitely needs replicating in other contexts – these were students who'd self-referred for treatment and all of them recovered, so it's not clear whether the same results would apply with other, potentially more at-risk groups (but note, a prior study of suicidal poets [pdf] found that those who used more first-person pronouns were more likely to die by suicide).
Despite its limitations, this is an intriguing result that shows the possibility of a relatively quick, efficient and objective way to estimate the likely persistence of suicidal thoughts. The measure would be "bias-free" which is important because it's known that clinicians' own subjective judgments can be off-target. Indeed, Brancu and her colleagues note that an informal survey of clinicians at conferences found that they thought more self-focused versus other-focused writings would be a positive sign, indicating that patients were better able to articulate their feelings.
_________________________________
Brancu, M., Jobes, D., Wagner, B., Greene, J., & Fratto, T. (2015). Are There Linguistic Markers of Suicidal Writing That Can Predict the Course of Treatment? A Repeated Measures Longitudinal Analysis Archives of Suicide Research DOI: 10.1080/13811118.2015.1040935
--further reading--
Greater use of "I" and "me" as a mark of interpersonal distress
What's different about those who attempt suicide rather than just thinking about it?
A study of suicide notes left by children and young teens
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Our free fortnightly email will keep you up-to-date with all the psychology research we digest: Sign up!
- By Treating Depression, Do We Also Treat Suicidality? The Answer Is Far From Straightforward
By guest blogger James Coyne. Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin warns against tackling questions that are too complicated to test, but too fascinating to give up. Whether psychotherapy or medication can reduce suicidality is...
- What's Different About Those Who Attempt Suicide Rather Than Just Thinking About It?
Only a minority of people who think about committing suicide actually go ahead and make a suicide attempt. Is there something different about these people – some way, perhaps, to identify those suicidal people who are at most risk? Kate Fairweather...
- Suicide Genes?
NeuroMark is still not ready to go... Special note from the company: Please send an email to X or call Y if you would like to receive information regarding the Mark-C test in the mail. Further announcements will be forthcoming on October 11th regarding...
- On Your Neuromark, Get Set...
...it's not set to GO yet! Oops, it seems that someone [The Lane Communications Group??] jumped the gun in submitting this press release for publication, because the company's website isn't ready yet: NeuroMark We are very sorry to inconvenience...
- Neuropsychology Abstract Of The Day: Suicide Assessment
The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale: initial validity and internal consistency findings from three multisite studies with adolescents and adults. American Journal of Psychiatry. 2011 Dec;168(12):1266-77. Posner K, Brown GK, Stanley B, Brent DA,...