Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA.
Crisis. 2012;33(6):335-43. doi: 10.1027/0227-5910/a000124.
Suicide has a devastating impact on both survivors and society, and many obstacles to improving prevention efforts stem from our inadequate understanding of suicidality. A potential source of this shortcoming is that the majority of empirical studies focus only on a single specified etiology of suicide.
To address this limitation, we present a further promising way to understand the suicidal state. We do so (1) by providing a brief review of something known as worlds theory (Bergner, 2006), and (b) by presenting the results of a study exploring the relationship between a person's taking it that his or her world is impossible/nonviable and his or her suicidal state.
In this research, participants were asked to assess the perceived levels of world viability (vs. impossibility/nonviability) of 12 actual persons depicted in clinical vignettes.
As predicted, participants judged the worlds of suicidal committers significantly more nonviable than those of suicide attempters, and these in turn significantly more nonviable than those of mentally disordered but nonsuicidal persons.
These findings indicate that the worlds of suicidal persons are unlivable--in worlds terms: impossible. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding the suicidal state and for intervening therapeutically.
自杀对幸存者和社会都有毁灭性的影响，而许多改善预防工作的障碍源于我们对自杀倾向的理解不足。造成这种缺陷的一个潜在原因是，大多数实证研究只关注单一特定的自杀病因。
为了解决这一局限性，我们提出了进一步理解自杀状态的有前途的方法。我们这样做（1）简要回顾一下所谓的世界理论（Bergner，2006），（b）介绍一项研究的结果，该研究探讨了一个人认为自己的世界不可能/无法生存与他/她的自杀状态之间的关系。
在这项研究中，要求参与者评估 12 个实际临床情景中描述的人的世界的可生存性（相对于不可能/无法生存）。
正如预测的那样，参与者判断自杀者的世界明显比自杀未遂者的世界更不可生存，而自杀未遂者的世界又明显比有精神障碍但没有自杀倾向的人的世界更不可生存。
这些发现表明，自杀者的世界是无法生存的——用世界的术语来说：不可能。我们讨论了这些发现对理解自杀状态和进行治疗干预的意义。
