Each year in the U.S., 25,000 adults commit suicide. People who have attempted suicide are at high risk for another suicide attempt.
Researchers wanted to know how to reduce that risk. They may have found their answer in a particular kind of psychotherapy, which appears to cut that risk by half.
Researchers in Philadelphia enrolled 120 patients in a study. Many of the patients had a variety of problems, but all had attempted suicide.
“When you’re faced with multiple major problems like medical problems, unemployment problems, major psychiatric illnesses and other social problems, it can be very overwhelming and you can find yourself very, very hopeless,” Gregory Brown of the University of Pennsylvania said.
Brown and colleagues studied whether a kind of counseling called cognitive therapy could help reduce the risk of repeat suicide attempts.
“The point of the therapy is to see if we could address the patients’ hopelessness which occurs prior to a suicide attempt and help them to be better problem solvers so that they won’t make another suicide attempt,” Brown said.
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Suicide prevention
A kind of counseling called cognitive therapy could help people who have repeatedly attempted suicide.
 
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In the 18-month study, about half the patients received usual care, including outpatient therapy, medication, or addiction treatment. The other half may also have received those treatments, but they received about 10 cognitive therapy sessions as well.
“So this treatment, this cognitive therapy treatment, really is an add-on treatment that directly focuses on reducing suicide behavior,” Brown said.
The study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
“The most important finding was that the patients who received the cognitive therapy were 50 percent less likely to make a repeat suicide attempt,” Brown said.
Forty-two percent of the patients who received usual care made a repeat suicide attempt, as compared to 24 percent of the patients who received cognitive therapy.
“When they felt really hopeless and desperate, to have them take a step back and look at their problems and try to come up with ways to solve them, that’s really what the therapy was about,” Brown said.
Patients who received cognitive therapy also felt significantly less hopeless and less depressed than those in usual care. Researchers say that may be one reason for fewer suicide attempts.
