Factors Associated With Reasons for Living Among Suicidal Adolescents

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Adolescent Mental Health

Background:

• Suicidal youth require interventions during care transitions.
• The Reasons for Living Inventory for Adolescents (RFL-A) measures protective factors.
• Understanding factors influencing RFL-A is crucial for treatment development.

Purpose of the Study:

• Identify baseline factors associated with RFL-A scores in adolescents.
• Determine factors predicting RFL-A scores over time.
• Examine the relationship between changes in characteristics and RFL-A changes.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of data from a pilot clinical trial for suicidal youth.
• Univariate analyses to identify associations between baseline characteristics and RFL-A.
• Multiple linear regression to identify key predictive variables.
• Longitudinal analysis of changes in characteristics and RFL-A.

Main Results:

• Better external emotion regulation and social support correlated with higher RFL-A.
• Depression, internal dysfunctional emotion regulation, anxiety, and poor sleep correlated with lower RFL-A.
• Internal and external emotion regulation were the most parsimonious predictors of RFL-A.
• Improvements in internal emotion regulation, sleep, and depression were associated with increased RFL-A.

Conclusions:

• Emotion regulation, particularly maladaptive internal strategies and use of external resources, is strongly linked to adolescent reasons for living.
• Improvements in internal emotion regulation (r=0.57), sleep (r=-0.45), and depression (r=-0.34) positively correlated with increases in RFL-A scores.
• Findings highlight the importance of targeting emotion regulation, sleep, and depression in interventions to enhance protective factors in suicidal adolescents.