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Centre for Suicide Research | Professor Mark Williams | Wellcome Trust Research Programme |
Overview
The Wellcome Research involves
several projects centred around the concept of cognitive reactivity (the
way in which small mood changes may induce large and catastrophic patterns
of negative thinking), and how our memory for past events sometimes succeeds
and sometimes fails to switch off this type of thinking.
Background
Previous research has found that
it is people who are most hopeless about the future, and who, when faced
with difficulties in their lives, cannot think of any alternative action,
who are most at risk for suicidal behaviour. If we are to understand suicidal
behaviour and develop effective psychological treatments we need to understand
how such hopelessness and severe problem solving difficulty come about.
Our research has discovered that both hopelessness and problem solving deficits
are closely linked with a difficulty such people have in retrieving events
from their past. They tend to recall their past in an overgeneral way, summarising
a number of events (e.g. I used to go for walks with my mother) without
retrieving a specific occasion (e.g. the time I fell in the stream).
Although such overgeneral recall might have been adaptive at one time (reducing
the impact of unpleasant events and so helping to control mood), it has
become maladaptive because it prevents the use of the past to generate solutions
to current problems, or to imagine the future in sufficient detail.
Plan
This programme of research will:
- examine what psychological
processes underlie overgeneral memory
- investigate how such difficulty
in memory allows the rapid escalation of suicidal ideas and impulses.
This involves testing people who have recovered from major depression,
to examine differences in reactivity between those who have and those
who have not had suicidal ideas as part of their depression
- examine warning signs for
further suicidal crises to see how far in advance of a suicidal episode
we can see them starting
- see whether a new form of
cognitive therapy we have developed (Mindfulness-based
Cognitive Therapy) can help reduce the escalation of suicidal ideas
in vulnerable patients by reducing cognitive reactivity
Further reading:
Mark Williams, Suicide and Attempted Suicide (Penguin, 2002)
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Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy
Accessibility: The links to the Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy site open in a new window
