Resilience can be defined as a positive development process after a risk, and risk can be seen as an ecological change that calls for development. One can gain strength from a loss instead of weakening. Even a suicide attempt can be a turning point for a positive trajectory even though a suicide attempt is a known risk factor for another future suicide attempt. This study identified a group of young people having had one attempt for suicide but no subsequent attempts within the following year and compared them with another group in which all have attempted suicide at least once in the year following the first attempt.
The paper is based on analysis from a longitudinal study of young suicide attempters in Denmark. This large study is based on a number of public registers that have been merged for the analysis. Every individual in Denmark has a unique identification number (CPR number) and this is used in this study to merge data from the different registers. The study is a nested case-control study where the cases emerge from a well-defined source population and the controls are sampled from the same population. The nested control design makes it possible to process data with conditional logistic regression procedure where influence of age and gender can be eliminated in order to make the measures estimated in the case-control samples more precise. The paper addresses several questions: What characterises the group having one attempt only? What protects them from trying again? ls there a difference in diagnosis? ls the risk of an additional attempt lower among young people from better-off families?
Recorded: October 2009, Dubrovnik - Cavtat, Croatia.
Coping & Resilience International Conference
Organiser: The Brisbane Institute of Strengths Based Practice
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