When
a person becomes suicidal, they don't necessarily rush to tell friends, family,
or even their doctor. They might feel ashamed of their thoughts and emotions,
and wish instead for them to simply disappear.
The
stigma surrounding suicide is partly why it's hard to predict and prevent. But
doctors also don't have great tools to diagnose whether someone is suicidal;
patients can conceal self-harm and minimize their experiences when completing
questionnaires designed to detect suicidal thinking.
"Suicidality
isn’t that you can’t cope with life; it’s that you’ve somehow gotten into a
pattern of thinking that leads you to consider suicide," says Marcel Just,
a cognitive neuroscientist who is the study's lead author and a professor of
psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
To analyze the results, the researchers used machine learning to
characterize people's brain activity patterns, and, 91 percent of the time, it
correctly determined which participant had a history of suicidal thoughts, and
which didn't. It also successfully identified which individuals had previously
attempted suicide.
In general, the analysis yielded critical information about which
concepts led to the clearest distinctions between the groups. The brains of
participants with suicidal thoughts and behavior responded much differently to
the words "death," "cruelty," "trouble,"
"carefree," "good," and "praise," and most of
those people showed high levels of self-reported depression that included a
negative view of the self, world, and the future.
"Our
research shows that suicidal ideation is exactly the way you think about
things," Just says. "Something changed the way your brain and mind
work."
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