by Michael D. Anestis, M.S., Psychotherapy Brown Bag

Right now, I'm approximately two-thirds of the way through the portion of my Abnormal Psychology course during which I teach my students about suicide. 

As I have mentioned on PBB many times before, suicide is topic plagued by misinformation and, as a result, I spend a good portion of this lecture discussing specific studies that refute commonly held but mistaken beliefs about suicide (e.g., suicide is an impulsive behavior, assessing for suicide risk causes people to become suicidal). 

In today's lecture, I spent a bit of time talking with my students about the fact that religious and cultural beliefs that discourage suicide are considered by many to be a protective factor, meaning that maintaining such beliefs indicates a lower risk that an individual will attempt and die by suicide. 

As we talked about this, I cautioned them not to leap to conclusions about the meaning of that data, as other factors often better explain the relationship between two variables.

Today, I would like to describe a study conducted by Randall Richardson-Vejlgaard and colleagues at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Columbia University School of Social Work that was published in late 2009 in the Journal of Affective Disorders. 

In this study, the authors looked at view of suicide in depressed individuals with and without alcohol use disorders (AUDs). 

Their goal was essentially to see if those with AUDs maintained different views towards suicide than individuals without AUDs and whether those views were related to suicidal ideation and behavior.

To do this, this authors recruited a sample of 521 participants diagnosed with depression (73% of sample) or bipolar disorder (currently in the depression phase; 27% of sample) as determined through a structured diagnostic interview. 

42% of the sample reported a past history of AUD and 50% had attempted suicide in the past. 

60% of the sample with a history of AUDs had a previous suicide attempt compared to 42% of the non-AUD sample.

The key finding in this study, as indicated by the authors, was that individuals with AUDs had fewer moral objections to suicide than did individuals without AUDs. 

Additionally, a lack of moral objections to suicide was associated with higher levels of suicidal ideation and prior suicidal behavior. 

The authors were careful not to overstate the implications of their findings, but the general assumption was that the lack of moral objections facilitates suicidal behavior in individuals with AUDs. 

Certainly this viewpoint is worthy of consideration; however, I found myself a bit frustrated by the data and conclusions here.

Continued on Psychotherapy Brown Bag

alcohol and health, problem drinking, alcoholism and health, drinking and suicide