Originally published August 7 2005
Talk therapy can prevent repeat suicide attempts, study finds
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Talking with a therapist about what triggers suicidal thoughts may prevent repeat suicide attempts in people who have previously attempted suicide.
A psychiatric technique of straight talk about tough problems reduces the chance that people who have survived one suicide attempt will try again, a new study finds.
The method is called cognitive therapy, and the risk of a second suicide try was cut almost in half for the 60 persons who received it, compared to those getting conventional treatment, according to a report by psychiatrists at the University of Pennsylvania.
The report appears in the Aug. 3 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is a themed issue on human rights and violence.
"Cognitive therapy, developed in the 1970s, targets the thoughts and beliefs that patients have related to a particular disorder or problem area, aiming to change those thoughts or beliefs," said Gregory K. Brown, a research associate professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry and a member of the research team.
Another member was Dr. Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist who is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy.
Said Brown: "We recruited suicide attempters from the emergency room and asked them to tell us the story, what led them to attempt suicide -- emotional triggers, major events in their lives, reactions to those events.
Measurements of depression found significantly lower levels for the cognitive therapy group.
"It is a very good start, but not the end of the story," said Jane Pearson, chairwoman of the National Institute of Mental Health Suicide Research Consortium, which funded the study and is now funding the University of Pennsylvania effort to make cognitive therapy more widely available.
Many other studies limit their efforts to a single cause, such as depression, she said.
An unsolved problem is detecting people who are likely to make the first suicide attempt, Berman said.
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