Depression and suicide behavior among college students: Understanding the moderator effects of self-esteem and suicide resilience
Year: 2013
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: As suicide-related incidents on college campuses increase and receive intense media coverage and a growing percentage of college students experience suicide ideation and attempts, there is a desperate need for a more profound understanding of suicidality and its risk and protective factors among college populations. Recent years there has been a growing interest in the buffering effect of resilience on suicidality (Johnson, Wood, Gooding, Taylor, & Tarrier, 2011). This study adds to the suicide literature by exploring the relationship among depression, self-esteem, suicide resilience, and suicidality. Undergraduate students from a large university in the Western United States were asked to assess their depressive symptoms, level of self-esteem, level of suicide resilience, and thoughts and behaviors of suicide. Multiple regression analyses were used to explore the relationships between these variables. The results indicate that depression was a statistically significant predictor of suicide behavior. Results also suggest that high self-esteem and high suicide resilience were buffers that protect college students who experience depression from developing suicide behavior. A three-way interaction of depression, self-esteem, and suicide resilience in predicting suicide behavior was also found to be statistically significant. It suggests that when self-esteem and suicide resilience were both high, the association between depression and suicide behavior was the weakest; when self-esteem and suicide resilience were both low, the association was the strongest. Additional clinical implications, limitations of the study, and suggestions for future research are addressed.
Author: Canzi Wang
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2270054181