Self‐Esteem and Suicide Ideation in Psychiatric Outpatients

Depression, hopelessness, and low self‐esteem are implicated as vulnerability factors for suicide ideation. The association of self‐esteem with suicide ideation after controlling for depressed mood and hopelessness was examined. Adult psychiatric outpatients (N = 338) completed measures of self‐esteem, suicide ideation, hopelessness, and depression. Self‐esteem was operationalized as beliefs about oneself (self‐based self‐esteem) and beliefs about how other people regard oneself (other‐based self‐esteem). Each dimension of self‐esteem was negatively associated with suicide ideation after controlling for depression and hopelessness. Of the two dimensions of self‐esteem, other‐based self‐esteem was the more robust predictor of suicide ideation. These findings suggest that even in the context of depression and hopelessness, low self‐esteem may add to the risk for suicide ideation.     

Impact of Death by Suicide of Patients on Thai Psychiatrists

The objective of this study was to identify the impact of a patient's suicide on psychiatrists in Thailand. A confidential coded postal questionnaire survey was sent to 320 eligible psychiatrists; with a response rate of 52.18%). The results showed that 94 (56.28%) of responding psychiatrists had a patient die by suicide, consistent with high rates found in similar large‐scale studies in the United States and United Kingdom. Less than half (41.5%) of patients had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, 33% had a depressive disorder, and the others had a wide array of diagnoses. More than 50% of psychiatrists reported personally experiencing sadness, depression, hopelessness, and guilt; 74.5% reported professional reactions, most frequently a review of their practice (93.4% reported being more aggressive in assessment of suicidality). Respondents were diverse in their postvention; 90% of Thai psychiatrists reported that working through with colleagues was most helpful. Family and friends helped. A majority (72.4%) of psychiatrists prayed or did “merit” for the dead patient; 86.8% found it helpful. This finding suggests that cultural sensitivity may be needed to understand the impact of suicide on psychiatrists but also to its response.     

Behavioral Risk Assessment of the Guarded Suicidal Patient

Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are trained to assess patients by direct observation and examination. Short inpatient length of stay, brief outpatient visits, emergency room evaluations, and other time‐limited clinical settings require rapid assessment of suicide risk. Recognition of behavioral suicide risk factors can assist in the early identification of the guarded suicidal patient, thus avoiding total reliance on the patient's reporting.     

Risk Factors for Attempting Suicide in Prisoners

We wished to examine determinants of suicidal behavior in prisoners. 903 male prisoners had a psychiatric interview which included various psychometric tests. Suicide attempters were compared with prisoners who had never attempted suicide. Significantly more of the attempters had a history of psychiatric disorder, substance abuse, a family history of suicidal behavior, convictions for violent crime, had exhibited aggressive behavior in jail, and had higher BGLHA aggression scores. A similar pattern of risk factors was found for prisoners with suicidal ideation. A lifetime history of attempting suicide, or of having suicidal ideation, is frequent in prisoners. Risk factors include family, developmental, aggression, personality, psychiatric, and substance abuse factors.     

When to Self-Correct?: A Comparison of Two Procedures on Spelling Performance

We compared the effects of two self-correction procedures on the spelling performance of 5 elementary school students with learning disabilities. Previous studies consistently have demonstrated self-correction to be more effective than traditional approaches to spelling instruction. However, we could find no single-subject design experiments analyzing the procedural details of how or when self-correction should be conducted to be most effective. For 4 days each week students practiced a list of 20 spelling words by listening to an audiotape on which the weekly list was dictated and writing the words. For half of each week's words, students checked and self-corrected after attempting each word; for the other half of the list, the students self-corrected after attempting all 10 words. An alternating treatments design showed self-correction after each word to be more effective for acquisition of new spelling words as measured by end-of-the-week tests for all 5 students, and maintenance of previously studied spelling words as measured by 1-week maintenance tests for 4 of the 5 students.     

Facilitated Communication as an Ideomotor Response

Forty college students were taught facilitated communication via a commercially available training videotape. They were then asked to facilitate the communication of a confederate, who was described as developmentally disabled and unable to speak. All 40 participants produced responses that they attributed at least partially to the confederate, and most attributed all of the communication entirely to her. Eighty-nine percent produced responses corresponding to information they had received, most of which was unknown to the confederate. Responding was significantly correlated with simple ideomotor responses with a pendulum and was not affected by information about the controversy surrounding facilitated communication. These data support the hypothesis that facilitated communication is an instance of automatic writing, akin to that observed in hypothesis and with Ouija boards, and that the ability to produce automatic writing is more common than previously thought.     

Acoustic confusion of digits in memory and recognition

It has been shown that, contrary to current opinion, digits do not confuse arbitrarily and that similar patterns of confusion are observed in memory and auditory recognition tasks. Two alternative measures of stimulus similarity are compared.