Reasons Why Suicidal Adolescents Want to Live: A Corpus-Driven Language Analysis

Adolescent suicidality is a major public and mental health crisis. Youths contemplating suicide experience an internal conflict between wanting to die and wanting to live. This study aimed to examine suicidal adolescents' self-reported reasons for living in order to develop a nuanced understanding of their individual perspectives and experiences.

Between January and December 2023, adolescent patients hospitalized for suicidality identified three reasons for living as a part of safety planning in the context of standard clinical care. Reasons for living were qualitatively analyzed by using corpus-driven language analysis to determine the most frequently occurring words in the dataset and to identify word-based patterns and contextual factors that indicate what matters to adolescents.

Participants were 211 adolescent patients; 97% identified three reasons for living. The corpus comprised 1,914 individual words and 494 unique word forms. Analysis of the 10 most common words (i.e., "my," "family," "friends," "want," "future," "mom," "be," "life," "sister," and "go") and the 10 most common nouns, adjectives, and verbs offered insights into adolescents' sense of belonging and purpose and reinforced the importance to adolescents of relationships, hobbies, ambitions, and responsibilities. Individual words, frequencies of occurrence, structures, and indicative examples are provided.

Reasons for living provide insights into what is important in the lives of suicidal adolescents. Thus, such reasons may serve as a protective factor to help reduce suicidality. Moreover, reasons for living can feasibly be used therapeutically to build rapport, establish therapy goals, and personalize evidence-based treatments.