Risk and Protective Factors in Ecuadorian Adolescent Survivors of Suicide

Abstract

Suicide is one of the main causes of death among the adolescent population, which is why it is considered an important mental-health problem. In addition to this situation, for each suicide, the group of people who survive it (known as suicide survivors) can present serious emotional affectations, becoming a population at risk for this problem. The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of suicide-survivor status on risk factors and protective factors for suicide. A total of 440 adolescents with a mean age of 15.78 (SD = 1.74) participated, who were divided according to survivor status, identified as the SV group (79 cases), and non-survivors, identified as the NSV group—adolescents that did not have experience or contact with a suicide attempt (361 cases). A questionnaire of sociodemographic characterization and risk conditions, the Alexian Brother Urge to Self-Injure (ABUSI), the Plutchik Suicide Risk Scale, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (TECA) were applied. Descriptive statistics, mean difference for independent samples, contingency tables, X2 statistic, Fisher’s exact statistic, and Cohen’s d coefficient were used. The results show significant differences between SV and NSV participants in risk and protective factors regarding the presence of a greater adoption of perspective and emotional understanding. On the other hand, NSV adolescents presented higher scores of perceived social supports regarding risk factors, and there was a higher proportion of a history of suicide attempt, severity/hospitalization, impulse to self-harm, and level of suicidal risk in the SV group. The need to incorporate forms of suicide prevention with the survivor population is discussed, increasing the possibilities of postvention.

Psychometric Properties of the Alexian Brother Urge to Self-Injure (ABUSI) Spanish Version for Adolescents

“…Another aspect that was explored to better characterize the participants was the family and social history of suicide, identifying that 16.60% of adolescents were suicide survivors, a figure slightly lower than that found in studies with Ecuadorian adolescents, where the percentage was 17.60% [37]. These data show that the risk characteristics present in the adolescents surveyed are similar to the characteristics of other populations and therefore it is expected that the results referring to the impulse to self-injurious behavior and its evaluation will not be affected by these conditions.…”

“…On the other hand, these results on correlations between suicidal potential and NSSI can be confusing if we take into account that a primary factor in NSSI is non-suicidality; however, recent studies on suicide risk have identified self-injurious behavior as an important predictor. of suicidal potential [37,[39][40][41]. This approach provides clues about possible future lines of research, since this study did not explore the motivations for NSSI, which were not necessarily directly related to suicidal ideation.…”