Problem Solving, Stress, and Coping in Adolescent Suicide Attempts

Twenty adolescents who had made suicide attempts were compared with 20 nonpsychiatric control subjects on measures of problem solving, stress, and coping. The suicidal group did not show evidence of “rigid” thinking or of deficits in the ability to generate solutions to standardized interpersonal pr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Suicide & life-threatening behavior 1995, Vol.25 (2), p.241-252
Main Authors: Wilson, Keith G., Stelzer, Josef, Bergman, James N., Kral, Michael J., Inayatullah, Mohamed, Elliott, Catherine A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation, Psychological
Adolescent
Adolescents
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Behavior Disorders
Biological and medical sciences
Cognitive Ability
Coping
Creative Thinking
Depression (Psychology)
Drug Use
Factor Structure
Family Relationship
Female
High School Students
Hospitals
Humans
Internal-External Control
Interpersonal Relationship
Interrater Reliability
Male
Manitoba
Medical sciences
Mental Disorders
Patient Admission
Patients
Personality Assessment
Personality Problems
Problem Solving
Psychological Stress
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Rating Scales
Research Assistants
Social research
Stress
Stress Management
Stress, Psychological - complications
Suicide
Suicide, Attempted - prevention & control
Suicide, Attempted - psychology
Suicides & suicide attempts
Teenagers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Twenty adolescents who had made suicide attempts were compared with 20 nonpsychiatric control subjects on measures of problem solving, stress, and coping. The suicidal group did not show evidence of “rigid” thinking or of deficits in the ability to generate solutions to standardized interpersonal problems. However, they did report recent histories of more severe life stress and had inaccurate appraisal of the extent to which stressful events could be controlled. Although suicidal patients were able to generate as many adaptive strategies as control subjects for coping with their own most severe recent real‐life stressor, they actually used fewer. They were also more likely to identify maladaptive behaviors as ways of coping. These findings support a transactional model of adolescent suicidal behavior, whereby inaccuracies in the appraisal aspects of problem solving (but not in the solution‐generation aspects) in the face of high life stress lead to a reduction in the use of adaptive efforts to cope.
ISSN:0363-0234
1943-278X
DOI:10.1111/j.1943-278X.1995.tb00923.x