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Personality and the Nature of Suicidal Attempts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Vinoda Narayana Murthy
Vinoda Narayana Murthy*
Affiliation:
All India Institute of Mental Health, Bangalore 27, India
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Extract

In a comparative study (Vinoda, 1966) of personality characteristics of 50 female attempted suicides and an individually matched group of 50 psychiatric controls and 50 normals, it was observed that the attempted suicides differed from the psychiatric and normal controls on measures of hostility, guilt, rigidity and neuroticism. Attempted suicides (AS) were significantly more hostile and rigid than both psychiatric controls (PC) and normal controls (NC), and they were significantly more personally ill (neurotic) than normal controls but not more than psychiatric controls. On the basis of previous researches it was hypothesized that the group of attempted suicides would be more hysteroid in their personality and intropunitive in the direction of their punitiveness than the control groups. The first study (Vinoda, 1966) did not reveal such differences. The scrutiny of results showed that there were more or less equal numbers of hysteroid and obsessoid personalities among attempted suicides and similarly a more or less equal number of persons who were intropunitive or extrapunitive in the direction of their aggression. This led the author to hypothesize that these variables might be more related to the nature of suicidal attempts in terms of seriousness of the attempts made.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 115 , Issue 524 , July 1969 , pp. 791 - 795
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1969 

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