If we are to have a chance to turn the rising suicide rates, researchers say we need to understand more about how suicide progresses – the developments that lead from suicidal thoughts to the act that takes a person’s life.
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An important part of that progress is time. How long do suicidal thoughts last in a person’s mind? How long does it take for those thoughts to induce someone to commit suicide? And how does a person’s perception of time affect things?
In a new study, researchers examined these questions by questioning a group of more than 280 participants.
The cohort included subjects who had recently attempted suicide, people with depression who are currently experiencing suicidal ideation, non-suicidal patients with depression, and healthy controls with no history of mental illness or drug abuse.
Participants performed a variety of tests designed to measure things like their level of depression and anxiety, as well as protocols that measure levels of impulsivity, and a time estimation task that gauges how quickly or slowly a person sees time passing.
In the results, the researchers found that among the individuals who had attempted suicide, the time they thought about suicide was dominated by two different patterns: those who thought of suicide for less than 5 minutes, and those who thought about it for more than 5 minutes thought. three hours.
Likewise, the suicide action interval – the time difference between the decision to commit suicide and the resulting attempt – showed a significant split in the data, with the majority of patients reporting less than 5 minutes or longer than three hours.
In addition, the researchers found that the perception of time delay was related to the severity of suicidal thoughts, with individuals who ponder suicidal thoughts for up to three hours showing a longer time delay in their time estimation results.
“The key message to take home is that a significant number of individuals who commit suicide do so impulsively,” lead author and psychiatrist Ricardo Caceda of Stony Brook University told PsyPost.
“A second point is that during a suicidal crisis, individuals experience time very slowly, probably contributing to the worsening of the experience of intense psychological distress.”
While there are limits to how much we can infer from the results, the researchers suggest that an increased sense of slow passage of time could reflect some sort of ‘derealization or depersonalization-like phenomena’, with similar changes in timekeeping observed in previous research with soldiers, and in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The experience of time delay or dilation in suicidal patients, likely caused by overwhelming psychological pain, may in turn worsen the perception of the inevitability of psychological pain,” the researchers write in their study.
“It could be hypothesized that the culmination of a suicide crisis could be a dissociative state caused by overwhelming psychological pain and characterized by a delayed perception of time.”
Beyond the hypotheses about the effects of time perception, the researchers hope their new data on timings related to suicidal contemplation and the suicidal action interval can help inform new clinical insights, making doctors more aware of risk factors associated with time, which could ever help improve suicide prevention strategies.
The findings are reported in European Neuropsychopharmacology
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