If we want to have the ability to change 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 suicidal ideation persist in a person’s mind? How long before these thoughts incite a person to attempt suicide? And how does an individual’s perception of time influence things?
In a new study, researchers investigated these questions, surveying a group of more than 280 participants.
The cohort included individuals who had recently attempted suicide, people with depression who experienced 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 examines the speed or slowness a person perceives. individual to pass the time.
In the results, the researchers found that among individuals who had attempted suicide, the amount of time they contemplated suicide was dominated by two different patterns: those who thought about suicide for less than 5 minutes and those who were suicidal. they thought for more than three hours.
Similarly, the suicide action interval (the time difference between the decision to commit suicide and the resulting attempt) showed a significant division in the data, with most patients indicating less than 5 minutes or more than three hours.
In addition, the researchers found that the perception of time deceleration was related to the severity of suicidal ideation, with individuals contemplating suicidal thoughts for up to three hours showing an increase in time deceleration. in the results of the time estimate.
“The main message back home is that a considerable number of people trying to commit suicide do so impulsively,” first author and psychiatrist Ricardo Caceda of Stony Brook University told PsyPost.
“A second point is that during a suicide crisis, people tend to experience time very slowly, which probably contributes to worsening the experience of intense psychological distress.”
While there are limits to what we can conclude from the results, researchers suggest that an increase in the sense of time that passes slowly could reflect a kind of “phenomena of the type of unrealization or depersonalization,” with similar alterations in the perception of time. . previous research with soldiers and in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The experience of slowing down or dilating time in suicidal patients, likely triggered by overwhelming psychological pain, in turn may worsen the perception of the inevitability of psychological pain,” the researchers write in their study.
“The hypothesis could be raised that the apogee of a suicide crisis could be a dissociative state, triggered by overwhelming psychological pain and characterized by a slowed perception of time.”
Beyond hypotheses about the effects of time perception, researchers hope their new data on times related to suicidal contemplation and the range of suicidal action can help inform new clinical understandings, giving physicians more awareness of time-related risk factors, which may one day help improve suicide prevention strategies.
The findings are reported in European neuropsychopharmacology.
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