Szanto, K, Bruine de Bruin, W, Parker, AM et al. (3 more authors) (2015) Decision-making competence and attempted suicide. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 76 (12). e1590-e1597. ISSN 0160-6689
Abstract
Objective: The propensity of people vulnerable to suicide to make poor life decisions is increasingly well documented. Do they display an extreme degree of decision biases? The present study used a behavioral decision approach to examine the susceptibility of low-lethality and high-lethality suicide attempters to common decision biases, which may ultimately obscure alternative solutions and deterrents to suicide in a crisis. Method: We assessed older and middle-aged individuals who made high-lethality (medically serious; N=31) and low-lethality suicide attempts (N=29). Comparison groups included suicide ideators (N=30), non-suicidal depressed (N=53), and psychiatrically healthy participants (N=28). Attempters, ideators, and non-suicidal depressed participants had unipolar non-psychotic major depression. Decision biases included sunk cost (inability to abort an action for which costs are irrecoverable), framing (responding to superficial features of how a problem is presented), under/overconfidence (appropriateness of confidence in knowledge), and inconsistent risk perception. Data were collected between June of 2010 and February of 2014. Results: Both high- and low-lethality attempters were more susceptible to framing effects, as compared to the other groups included in this study (p< 0.05, ηp2 =.06). In contrast, low-lethality attempters were more susceptible to sunk costs than both the comparison groups and high-lethality attempters (p< 0.01, ηp2 =.09). These group differences remained after accounting for age, global cognitive performance, and impulsive traits. Premorbid IQ partially explained group differences in framing effects. Conclusion: Suicide attempters’ failure to resist framing may reflect their inability to consider a decision from an objective standpoint in a crisis. Low-lethality attempters’ failure to resist sunk cost may reflect their tendency to confuse past and future costs of their behavior, lowering their threshold for acting on suicidal thoughts.
Metadata
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Institution: | The University of Leeds | ||||||
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Management Division (LUBS) (Leeds) | ||||||
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Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications | ||||||
Date Deposited: | 29 Jul 2015 09:39 | ||||||
Last Modified: | 03 Nov 2016 07:01 | ||||||
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.4088/JCP.15m09778 | ||||||
Status: | Published | ||||||
Publisher: | Physicians Postgraduate Press | ||||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.15m09778 |