Measuring The Suicidal Mind Summary

The article, Measuring the Suicidal Mind: Implicit Cognition Predicts Suicidal Behavior explored the implicit cognitive associations, of death/suicide, of participants who had attempted suicide and had arrived in the psychiatric emergency department. Researchers identified that one of main issues with the existing predictive measurements of suicidal behavior, was that it heavily relied on the self-reports of individuals. However, individuals may deceit clinicians into thinking that there is no indication of future attempts in order to avoid treatment or interventions. Conversely, individuals may feign responses as a means of obtaining attention. Going a step further, some individuals who are at risk of future suicidal attempts may be unaware of their cognitive processes that can lead to executing the attempts. In view of such complications, researchers developed and evaluated versions of the Implicit Associations Test(IAT), which measures associations of death/suicide on individuals seeking treatment in a psychiatric emergency department. When evaluation individuals with IAT, there was a strong implicit association between death/suicide and self in …show more content…
However, they believe an alternative reasoning is that implicit associations between death/ suicide and self is a consequence of prior suicidal behavior. Which suggest that individuals without suicidal behavior (or very explicit behavior) could go undetected by clinicians. The IAT is deemed to be vey sensitive in predicting future suicidal attempts. Nonetheless, if patients do not appear with clear cut suicidal tendencies than they may not get the test. Furthermore, individuals who are considered to be non-suicidal injurers, may go “under the radar” since they have yet to have a suicidal attempt, but it does not indicate they may not attempt to kill