Talk Therapy Helps Reduce Suicide Risk, Research Finds

Amy Taylor November 24, 2014

Talk therapy is a proven intervention for many mental health problems, including anxiety disorder and depression. Now, new research suggests that repeated suicide attempts and deaths by suicide were about 25 per cent lower among those who participated in talk therapy after their suicide attempt.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that voluntary short-term psychosocial counselling actually works to prevent suicide.

Although the patients received just six to 10 therapy sessions, the researchers found long-term benefits. They report that five years after the counselling ended, there were 26 per cent fewer suicides in the group that received treatment compared to a group that did not.

“We know that people who have attempted suicide are a high-risk population and that we need to help them. However, we did not know what would be effective in terms of treatment,” said Annette Erlangsen, PhD, study leader and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins.

“Now we have evidence that psychosocial treatment — which provides support, not medication — is able to prevent suicide in a group at high risk of dying by suicide.”

For the study, researchers looked at the data of 65,000 people in Denmark who attempted suicide between Jan. 1, 1992, and Dec. 31, 2010. Denmark, which provides free health care for its citizens, first opened suicide prevention clinics in 1992. The clinics went nationwide in 2007. They found that during the first year, those who received therapy were 27 percent less likely to attempt suicide again and 38 percent less likely to die of any cause.

After five years, there were 26 per cent fewer suicides in the group that had been treated. After 10 years, the suicide rate for those who had therapy was 229 per 100,000 compared to 314 per 100,000 in the group that did not get the talk therapy.

The researchers noted that the therapy varied depending on the individual needs of the patient, so they can’t pinpoint exactly what the “active ingredient” was that inoculated those against future suicide attempts.

While it is possible that it was simply having a safe, confidential place to talk, the researchers said they plan to gather more data on which specific types of therapy may have worked better than others.

The study was published in Lancet Psychiatry.

Source of this article: Suicide Risk Plummets After Talk Therapy