In an article written by Nicholas Bakalar for The New York Times, he discusses that Short-term psychotherapy may be an effective way to prevent repeated suicide attempts.
Short-term psychotherapy may be an effective way to prevent repeated suicide attempts.
Using detailed Danish government health records, researchers studied 5,678 people who had attempted suicide and then received a program of short-term psychotherapy based on needs, including crisis intervention, cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy, and psychodynamic and psychoanalytic treatment. They compared them with 17,034 people who had attempted suicide but received standard care, including admission to a hospital, referral for treatment or discharge with no referral. They were able to match the groups in more than 30 genetic, health, behavioral and socioeconomic characteristics. The study is online in Lancet Psychiatry.
Treatment focused on suicide prevention and comprised eight to 10 weeks of individual sessions.
Over a 20-year follow-up, 16.5 percent of the treated group attempted suicide again, compared with 19.1 percent of the untreated group. In the treated group, 1.6 percent died by suicide, compared with 2.2 percent of the untreated.
“Suicide is a rare event,” said the lead author, Annette Erlangsen, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “and you need a huge sample to study it. We had that, and we were able to find a significant effect.”
The authors estimate that therapy prevented 145 suicide attempts and 30 deaths by suicide in the group studied.
