scholarly journals Cognitive networks identify dimensions of distress in suicide notes: Anxiety, emotional profiles, and "words not said"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Swanson ◽  
Andreia Sofia Teixeira ◽  
Brianne N. Richson ◽  
Ying Li ◽  
Thomas Hills ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Real World ◽  
Network Science ◽  
Cognitive Networks ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Public Health Concern ◽  
High Anxiety ◽  
Emotion Words ◽  
Suicide Notes

Suicide remains a serious public-health concern that is difficult to accurately predict in real-world settings. To identify potential predictors of suicide, we examined the emotional content of suicide notes using methods from cognitive network science. Specifically, we compared the co-occurrence networks of suicide notes with those constructed out of emotion words written by individuals scoring low or high on measures of depression, anxiety, and stress. Our objective was to identify which networks were most similar to the suicide notes network, in particular with regard to the connectivity between words and their emotional contents. We also investigated what types of words remained in the high/low emotion networks after controlling for the words present in the suicide notes, which we conceptualize as the “words not said” in the suicide notes. We found that patterns of connectivity among emotion words in suicide notes were most similar to those in texts written by low-anxiety individuals. However, upon analyzing the “words not said” in suicide notes, we observed that the remaining collection of emotions in suicide notes was most similar to those expressed by high-anxiety individuals. We discuss how these findings relate with existing clinical psychological literature as well as their potential implications for predicting suicidal behavior.

scholarly journals Not Flourishing Mental Health Is Associated with Higher Risks of Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms in College Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Isabelle Doré ◽  
Jennifer O’Loughlin ◽  
Marie-Pierre Sylvestre ◽  
Catherine Michelle Sabiston ◽  
Guy Beauchamp ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Mental Health ◽  
College Students ◽  
Depressive Symptoms ◽  
Youth Mental Health ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Public Health Concern ◽  
High Anxiety ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Health Promotion Interventions

Youth mental health is a major public health concern. This study assesses whether baseline and short-term changes in mental health predict anxiety and depressive symptoms in college students. Not flourishing mental health at baseline was a risk factor for high levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Compared to participants with stable flourishing mental health, those who declined to not flourishing and those who were stable not flourishing had increased risks of high anxiety and depressive symptoms. Assessing mental health may be effective in predicting mental disorder symptoms and supports the need for mental health promotion interventions.

Teachers' Knowledge of Facts and Myths about Suicide

2004 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 651-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
High Schools ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
General Information ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Prevention Strategies ◽  
Public Health Concern ◽  
Community Members ◽  
School Teachers

Suicidal behavior is a serious public health concern that has prompted the development of prevention strategies, which include increasing community members' knowledge about suicide. Given that teachers are in a key position to recognize and respond to suicidal behavior, this study examined teachers' knowledge about suicide to identify how they need to be educated relative to its prevention. 82 Canadian school teachers from middle and high schools were administered a revised version of the 32-item Facts on Suicide Quiz to examine their knowledge of suicide. Analysis indicated that general information about suicide was limited, while knowledge of clinically relevant information about suicide, e.g., “Suicide rarely happens without warning,” was relatively high.

Reframing Fatness: Critiquing ‘Obesity’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethan Evans ◽  
Charlotte Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Weight Loss ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Overweight And Obesity ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Public Health Concern ◽  
Policy Language ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Fat Bodies

Over the last twenty years or so, fatness, pathologised as overweight and obesity, has been a core public health concern around which has grown a lucrative international weight loss industry. Referred to as a ‘time bomb’ and ‘the terror within’, analogies of ‘war’ circulate around obesity, framing fatness as enemy.2 Religious imagery and cultural and moral ideologies inform medical, popular and policy language with the ‘sins’ of ‘gluttony’ and ‘sloth’, evoked to frame fat people as immoral at worst and unknowledgeable victims at best, and understandings of fatness intersect with gender, class, age, sexuality, disability and race to make some fat bodies more problematically fat than others. As Evans and Colls argue, drawing on Michel Foucault, a combination of medical and moral knowledges produces the powerful ‘obesity truths’ through which fatness is framed as universally abject and pathological. Dominant and medicalised discourses of fatness (as obesity) leave little room for alternative understandings.

European Surveillance of Antimicrobial Consumption: the ESAC programme

2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Antimicrobial Resistance ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Antimicrobial Consumption ◽  
Public Health Concern ◽  
Major Public Health Concern

Resistance to antimicrobials has become a major public health concern, and it has been shown that there is a relationship, albeit complex, between antimicrobial resistance and consumption

A Preliminary Report on Alcohol-Associated DNA Methylation Changes and Suicidal Behavior: Evidence Using Mendelian Randomization

2021 ◽  
pp. 105413732095224
Author(s):  
Charleen D. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Dna Methylation ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Genome Wide Association Study ◽  
Mendelian Randomization ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Economic Stress ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
The Us

Suicide is a major public health concern. In 2015, it was the 10th leading cause of death in the US. The number of suicides increased by 30% in the US from 1999 to 2016, and a greater uptick in suicides is predicted to occur as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, for which the primary public-health strategy is physical distancing and during which alcohol sales have soared. Thus, current strategies for identifying at-risk individuals and preventing suicides, such as relying on self-reported suicidal ideation, are insufficient, especially under conditions of physical distancing, which exacerbate isolation, loneliness, economic stress, and possibly alcohol consumption. New strategies are urgent now and into the future. To that aim, here, a two-sample Mendelian randomization (an instrumental variables technique using public genome-wide association study data as data sources) was performed to determine whether alcohol-associated changes in DNA methylation mediate risk for suicidal behavior. The results suggest that higher alcohol-associated DNA methylation levels at cg18120259 confer a weak causal effect. Replication and triangulation of the results, both experimentally and with designs other than Mendelian randomization, are needed. If the findings replicate, the information might be utilized to raise awareness about the biological links between alcohol and suicide and possibly explored as a biomarker of risk, perhaps especially for early detection of those who may not self-report suicidal intent.

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