S. Elizabeth Kortlander, Ph.D.
Over 31,000 people per year die by suicide, making it the eleventh leading cause of death (Suicide Prevention Action Network.) Yet are there interventions that might help to reduce the rate of suicide, saving not only the lives of its victims, but preventing the agonizing toll suicide takes on those who survive the victim’s death?
Among the many pathways that may lead to suicide, are deficits in cognition that maybe associated with this final, and desperate, act. Specifically, suicidal individuals demonstrate three critical characteristics in their thinking, feeling, and behavior. First they are in a tremendous amount of emotional pain, or “psychache.” Secondly, their thinking is constricted, making it difficult, if not impossible to generate solutions to their predicament. And lastly they have a strong sense that they must take action (so called “purtubation”). (See Shneidman, The Suicidal Mind, 1996, for a complete description).
Taken as a whole, these three factors may be seen as a catastrophic failure in problem solving, resulting in the suicidal individual’s “black and white” mindset that they must either endure unbearable pain or kill themselves. With this in mind, it makes sense to speculate that teaching good problem solving skills, from an early age, might be one means to help buffer the effects of pain producing stress that may result in suicidality for some vulnerable individuals. Indeed, Martin Seligman, Ph.D. (The Optimistic Child, 1995) has proposed the value of developing an “emotional vaccine” to help children learn the tools for more optimistic thinking. Essentially this includes helping them to develop the skills to persistently meet challenges, and develop the patience to solve problems.
Much has been researched and written about problem solving. Essentially there are two broad, critical components: 1) Having the motivation to attempt to solve problems—that is the belief that one’s efforts will have impact. 2) Having the specific skills associated with problem solving. While this may sound daunting, the reality is that with heightened awareness on the part of parents, educators, and others involved in the lives of children is critical. Problem solving skills can be cultivated via modeling, encouragement and education.
Children are born problem solvers and much of development is propelled through figuring out how to face and master challenges, cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally. The trick is to raise children’s awareness of the problem, what their choices are for handling the problem, and the consequences of their choices.. Even something as simple as coping with a missing pair of shoes or discovering that a restaurant does not serve a desired food, can be identified and processed as a lesson in problem solving. While these situations may seem far removed from the desperate situations faced by suicidal individuals, a life time of tracking and practicing solving problems, big and small, might help individuals develop the habit of managing difficulties in terms of problems solving. With such a habit, this might allow for more automatic processing of stressful information in terms of problem solving. This automatic component could be critical when emotions are powerful, and can easily drain energy from the task of seeing alternatives and managing powerful impulses to take action.
