If we have a chance to reverse the high suicide rates, researchers say we need to understand more about how suicide progresses – the developments that lead from suicidal thoughts to the act that takes a person’s life.
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An important part of this progression is time. How long does the suicidal idea linger in a person’s mind? How long before these thoughts cause a person to attempt suicide? And how does the individual’s perception of time influence things?
In a new study, researchers investigated these questions, questioning a group of more than 280 participants.
The cohort included people who recently attempted suicide, people with depression who are currently experiencing suicidal thoughts, non-suicidal patients with depression, and healthy controls with no history of mental illness or drug abuse.
Participants performed a variety of tests, designed to measure things like their level of depression and anxiety, but also protocols that measured impulsivity levels and a time-estimating task that analyzes how fast or slow an individual perceives time pass.
In the results, the researchers found that among people who attempted suicide, the time period in which they thought about suicide was dominated by two distinct patterns: those who thought about suicide for less than 5 minutes. and those who thought about it for more than three hours.
Similarly, the suicide interval – the time difference between the decision to commit suicide and the resulting attempt – showed a significant division of the data, with most patients indicating either less than 5 minutes or more than three hours.
In addition, the researchers found that the perception of slowing down was linked to the severity of the suicidal ideation, with individuals contemplating suicidal thoughts for up to three hours, showing a slowing down in time as a result of estimating time.
“The main message at home is that a considerable number of people trying to commit suicide do so on an impulsive basis,” Ricardo Caceda, the first author and psychiatrist at Stony Brook University, told PsyPost.
“A second point is that during a suicide crisis, individuals tend to experience time very slowly, probably contributing to the worsening of the experience of intense psychological suffering.”
Although there are limits to how much we can conclude from the results, the researchers suggest that an increased sense of time passing slowly could reflect some kind of “derealization or depersonalization phenomena”, with similar changes in the perception of time being observed in previous research with soldiers and patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The experience of slowing down or dilating time in suicidal patients, probably triggered by overwhelming psychological pain, may in turn worsen the perception of the inevitability of psychological pain,” the researchers write in their study.
“It could be hypothesized that the height of a suicidal crisis could be an associative state, triggered by overwhelming psychological pain and characterized by a slowed perception of time.”
Beyond the assumptions about the effects of time perception, the researchers hope that their new data on suicidal ideation and suicidal ideation could help inform new clinical understandings, giving doctors more awareness of time-related risk factors. which could one day improve suicide prevention strategies.
The findings are reported in European Neuropsychopharmacology.
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