Modeling the Suicidal Behavior Cycle: Understanding Repeated Suicide Attempts Among Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder and a History of Attempting Suicide.

Objective: Suicide remains a leading cause of death in the United States, and recent reports have suggested the suicide rate is increasing. One of the most robust predictors of future suicidal behavior is a history of attempting suicide. Despite this, little is known about the factors that reduce the likelihood of reattempting suicide. This study compares theoretically derived suicide risk indicators to determine which factors are most predictive of future suicide attempts. Method: We used data from a randomized, controlled trial comparing 3 forms of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT; Linehan et al., 2015). Participants (N = 97, mean age = 30.3 years, 100% female, 71% White) met criteria for borderline personality disorder and had repeated and recent self-injurious behavior. Assessments occurred at 4-month intervals throughout 1 year of treatment and 1 year of follow-up. Time-lagged generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) were used to evaluate relationship satisfaction, emotion dysregulation, and coping styles as predictors of suicide attempts. Results: Both univariate and multivariate models suggested that higher between-person variance in problem-focused coping and lack of access to emotion regulation strategies were weakly associated with additional suicide attempts over the 2-year study. Within-person variance in the time-lagged predictors was not associated with subsequent suicide attempts. Conclusions: Among individuals with a recent suicide attempt, problem-focused coping and specific deficits in emotion regulation may differentiate those likely to reattempt from those who stop suicidal behavior during and after psychotherapy. These results suggest that treatments for recent suicide attempters should target increasing problem-focused coping and decreasing maladaptive emotion regulation skills. What is the public health significance of this article?: Suicide is a complex public health problem, and researchers are unable to reliably predict when suicide attempts are likely to occur. Results from this study suggest that some of the risk factors studied to date explain differences between people who continue to be at high-risk for suicide, but individual deviations in these risk factors do not prospectively predict suicide attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]