Resolving Ethical Dilemmas in Suicide Prevention: The Case of Telephone Helpline Rescue Policies

The ethical basis of suicide prevention is illustrated by contrasting helpline emergency rescue policies of the Samaritans and the AAS and the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline network. We contrast moralist, relativist, and libertarian ethical premises and question whether suicide can be rational. Samaritans respect a caller's right to decide to die by suicide; U.S. helplines oblige emergency intervention during an attempt even against the caller's will. We analyze the effect of emergency rescue when there is high suicide risk but an attempt has not been initiated. We examine links between values and actions, needs for empirical evidence to guide practice, and propose vigorous dialogue about values in the gray zone of moral practice.     

Willingness of Mentally Ill Individuals to Sign Up for a Novel Proposal to Prevent Firearm Suicide

The study goal was to determine whether a significant number of high suicide risk individuals would confidentially put their own names onto a list to prevent future gun purchases. An anonymous written survey was administered in an inpatient psychiatric unit and two outpatient psychiatric clinics at an academic medical center. Two hundred forty individuals were approached to fill out the survey, of whom 200 (83.3%) did so. Forty‐six percent of participants stated that they would put their own name onto the list. This novel suicide prevention proposal, a Do‐Not‐Sell List, would appeal to many people at high risk for suicide.     

Emotional vitality in infancy as a predictor of cognitive and language abilities in toddlerhood

Previous work by our group has shown that infant emotional vitality (EV), the lively expression of shared emotion both positive and negative, predicts cognitive and language abilities in toddlerhood. Specifically, infants who demonstrated a pattern of high emotional expression combined with high bids to their caregivers, fared significantly better on the Bayley II and Preschool Language Scales (PLS‐3) at 2 years of age than infants who showed both low expression and low bids to mother. That study was conducted on a large, low‐income, ethnically diverse sample. The current study was undertaken with a smaller but demographically similar sample as an effort to demonstrate the value of EV as a construct and to provide additional information about its links with later developmental outcomes. Replication that included a variation in the age at which EV was assessed provides support for the generalizability of the construct. In addition, this study examined EV's effects further into childhood than did the original study in order to insure they are not limited to a brief window in toddlerhood. The results indicate that over and above maternal psychological resources, EV expressed during positive/joyful and frustrating circumstances in 8‐month‐olds accounted for significant portions of variance in expressive language at 30 months and cognitive‐developmental assessments at 24 and 36 months. This study supports EV as an important relational‐emotional behaviour that increases experiences that optimize developmental outcomes. Successful replication suggests that EV holds promise as a construct with clinical utility for early interventions attempting to improve developmental outcomes in children from poor families. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.