Talk Therapy Helps Decrease The Risk Of Suicide

A new study shows that talk therapy helps decrease the risk of suicide by as much as 26 percent. Findings published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry show that suicide survivors who also underwent psychological counseling after attempting to end their life were much less likely to commit another suicide attempt when compared to those who did not receive counseling.

Study author Annette Erlangsen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Mental Health and colleagues examined data on over 65,000 individuals in Denmark who attempted to commit suicide between January 1992 and December 2010. From this sample, 5,878 received voluntary short-term psychosocial therapy from a suicide prevention clinic.

Findings revealed that talk-therapy based intervention programs helped to reduce suicide risk by about 26 percent and death by 38 percent in the first year, alone. By the tenth year, only 229 per 100,000 committed suicide compared to 314 per 100,000 in the control group.

However, researchers are still working to determine the exact factor in therapy that helped stop this occurrence.

"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," added Erlangsen, via a news release. "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."

Statistics show that someone commits suicide every 40 seconds worldwide.

Scientists and health officials around the world are continually working on intervention treatments to prevent this tragic problem.

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