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Abstract
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Very little research studies the thoughts and emotions of individuals close to the time of their suicide. The present study examined changes in the thoughts and emotions of suicides as the day of their suicide grows closer. The last few months of the diaries of four young women who died by suicide were analysed using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC). No commonalities were found across the four diaries. Suicides may be unique, and only theories that propose general constructs may be able to account for the majority of suicides.
It has long been of interest how the thoughts and emotions change in people who are planning their deaths by suicide. An early study by Keith-Spiegel and Spiegel (1967) found that psychiatric patients who died by suicide in the hospital showed an improvement in mood on the day prior to their suicide, while Lester (2010) observed a calming in the mood of a young man who left two tape recordings for his parents six and two hours prior to his suicide. The second recording had more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. There was more concern with others and less concern with the reasons for his impending act.
Looking at a longer time period, Pennebaker and Stone (2004) found that the percentage of positive emotions increased over the last year of the life of a young woman who died by suicide while the percentage of negative emotions declined. They examined the last year of her diary, dividing the period using the five books containing the diary and documented a decrease in references to herself. Words concerned with death and sex declined, while words concerned with religion increased.
The problem with case studies is that the results found for the single case may not have relevance for other individuals. A larger sample would permit more robust and generalizable findings, but the diaries of suicides that are available for research studies are hard to obtain. The present paper looks at four diaries from young women who died by suicide in order to explore whether there were commonalities across all four diaries...
Language: en |