Problem Solving, Stress, and Coping in Adolescent Suicide Attempts

• Published in: Suicide & life-threatening behavior Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 241 - 252
• Main Authors: Wilson, Keith G., Stelzer, Josef, Bergman, James N., Kral, Michael J., Inayatullah, Mohamed, Elliott, Catherine A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1995; Guilford; Human Sciences Press
• 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; Human; Social interaction; Problem solving; Coping; Interpersonal relation; Stress; Suicide attempt
• ISSN: 0363-0234; 1943-278X
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1943-278X.1995.tb00923.x

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.