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

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.

Drama Uncloseted in Boston

Chapter 1, “Drama Uncloseted in Boston,” argues that American urbanity began at home. The cosmopolitanism practiced in elite domestic spaces after the American Revolution signaled an urban future; in opening these homes to a broader public, novels would transform it. But not without serious resistance. Instead of embracing urbanity after the revolution, Bostonians strained to negotiate competing desires for republican equality and cosmopolitan sophistication. This tension found a fitting narrative in a public scandal of incestuous infidelity, pregnancy, and suicide involving Perez Morton, a prominent Boston lawyer and drama aficionado; his wife, poet Sarah Wentworth Morton; and her sister, Fanny Apthorp, whose published suicide notes were widely read. I trace the scandal’s circulation through Boston newspapers, as a subplot in William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, and in three plays, two by Brown himself, that were printed for private performances in Boston, where public theater remained illegal. These texts offer a fascinating case study of the formally diverse and multivocal print culture in which cosmopolitan culture clashed with new ideas about American urbanity. The epistolary novel emerged as a form concerned not with the past or present, I argue, but with the future—a future that writes out of existence the varied voices, especially female and Black voices, present in the plays, poetry, and papers.

Revealing semantic and emotional structure of suicide notes with cognitive network science

Understanding how people who commit suicide perceive their cognitive states and emotions represents an important open scientific challenge. We build upon cognitive network science, psycholinguistics and semantic frame theory to introduce a network representation of suicidal ideation as expressed in multiple suicide notes. By reconstructing the knowledge structure of such notes, we reveal interconnections between the ideas and emotional states of people who committed suicide through an analysis of emotional balance motivated by structural balance theory, semantic prominence and emotional profiling. Our results indicate that connections between positively- and negatively-valenced terms give rise to a degree of balance that is significantly higher than in a null model where the affective structure is randomized and in a linguistic baseline model capturing mind-wandering in absence of suicidal ideation. We show that suicide notes are affectively compartmentalized such that positive concepts tend to cluster together and dominate the overall network structure. Notably, this positive clustering diverges from perceptions of self, which are found to be dominated by negative, sad conceptual associations in analyses based on subject-verb-object relationships and emotional profiling. A key positive concept is “love”, which integrates information relating the self to others and is semantically prominent across suicide notes. The emotions constituting the semantic frame of “love” combine joy and trust with anticipation and sadness, which can be linked to psychological theories of meaning-making as well as narrative psychology. Our results open new ways for understanding the structure of genuine suicide notes and may be used to inform future research on suicide prevention.

Investigating Conceptual Metaphorical Expression in English Suicide Notes: A Cognitive Linguistic Study

The human experience is mysterious, so, metaphor is commonly used to portray life experiences. The significance of metaphor for expressing and developing selfhood. The function of metaphor in determining the conceptual meanings in suicide letters. Language reflects our worldviews. Language is a component of the body. The technique is used to illuminate crucial issues in cognitive semantics that is linked between experience, the conceptual system, and the semantic structures encoded by language is studied in cognitive semantics. These include conceptual metaphor and embodied cognition. The study's flaw is that body metaphors and embodiment may be linked. A suicide note's cultural domain aspect and the importance of interpreting conceptual metaphoric notions cannot be overstated. The study claims that body metaphors utilized in suicide can be systematized utilizing sensoryperceptual information of the outside environment. Either way, the body or actual components as domains are clearly connected. Art is considered to require embodiment.

Why Choose the Railway?

Background: The impact of railway suicide in the United Kingdom is extensive, yet reasons for why people choose this method are not clearly understood and research into the examination of suicide notes in this area is limited. Aims: Our study aimed to utilize the unique access to suicide notes written by those who died by suicide on the railway so as to gain a greater understanding of why people chose this method. Method: Descriptive and thematic analysis was conducted on 75 suicide notes for those who had died by suicide on the UK railway between 2010 and 2016. Results: Demographic findings from the sample were largely consistent with railway UK data trends. Five main themes were identified as being significant: “certain and instant,” “impersonal and non-human,” “ability to be planned,” “a good death,” and “bereavement suicide.” Limitations: Findings are based on suicide note authors who died by suicide on the railway in the UK, as such generalizability may be limited. Conclusion: Findings suggest that people select the railway for their suicide for the following motives: perception of being instant and certain and viewed as a good death, ability to be planned, belief it causes less of a burden on loved ones (via the perception of the railway as impersonal), and a prior experience of it being fatal (via bereavement suicide). Key implications in relation to prevention strategies and future research are discussed.

Dying in a foreign land: A study of completed suicides among foreign workers in Singapore

Suicide is a public health issue that impacts a nation’s resident and non-resident populations alike. Singapore has one of the largest non-resident (work permit holder) populations in the world, yet very little attention has been given to examining suicide in this population. The current study examined the case materials of all 303 non-resident completed suicides in Singapore in the period January 2011 to December 2014. Their basic profiles were compared with that of the 1,507 resident cases in the same period. A sample of 30 death notes written by non-residents were randomly selected and thematically analyzed to supplement the descriptive findings and discussion. Results showed that suicides were highest among males, those aged 21–35 years old, and South Asians. Most non-resident suicide cases did not have known physical or mental health issues, prior suicide attempts, or suicide notes. Suicide decedents from South Asia and Europe most frequently used hanging, while jumping was most common among decedents from other regions. Relationship and health problems emerged as the top two suspected triggers for suicide based on our analysis of the suicide notes. The unique situation of working abroad may increase non-residents’ vulnerability in general, while adverse life events such as relationship and health issues may be too overwhelming to bear, especially when support services are not readily available and accessible. The results have implications for suicide prevention among this neglected group of people who choose to work in foreign lands.