My articles on suicide that have never been cited

 

MY ARTICLES ON SUICIDE THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN CITED 

David Lester 

            As of June 24, 2021, my top cited articles according to Google Scholar are the following.

AT Beck, A Weissman, D Lester, L Trexler (1974). The measurement of pessimism: the hopelessness scale. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 42(6), 861-865

Citations: 6785

LJ Collett, D Lester (1969). The fear of death and the fear of dying. Journal of Psychology, 72(2), 179-181

Citations: 725

D Lester (1992). Why people kill themselves: a 1990s summary of research findings on suicidal behavior. Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas 1992

Citations: 486

K Krysinska, D Lester (2010. Post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide risk: a systematic review. Archives of suicide research, 14(1), 1-23

Citations: 411

M Pompili, G Serafini, M Innamorati, G Dominici, S Ferracuti, ...(2010). Suicidal behavior and alcohol abuse. International journal of environmental research and public health, 7(4)

Citations: 399

M Pompili, XF Amador, P Girardi, J Harkavy-Friedman, M Harrow, ...(2007). Suicide risk in schizophrenia: learning from the past to change the future. Annals of general psychiatry 6(1), 1-22.

Citations: 386

          My most cited article is not specifically on suicide but, of course, it has been cited frequently in articles on suicide, and the scale (and its construct) have become central in the field. I work on topics other than suicide, and my fear of death scale has become my second most cited article. Why People Kill Themselves has four different editions, each reviewing suicide research from different decades and eras, and one of the four ranks third. I work with Maurizio Pompili and his team on many articles, and two of those are in my top-six most cited articles. None of this is surprising except for the amazingly large number of citations for the Hopeless Scale.

          I have 53,304 citations for my work, my h-index is 89 and my i10-index 1100. I have 2,719 articles on my Google Scholar profile. Pretty good, but I have a large number of articles that have never been cited.

          Sixteen were published in 2021 and 34 in 2020, and so they are too recent to be cited. I eliminated articles without suicide in the title. Of the remaining articles, three were letters to medical journal, while 54 were in Psychological Reports, and 32 in Perceptual and Motor Skills, almost all of which were brief notes in journals that used to have a very poor reputation among scholars, but which published many ground-breaking and creative ideas (or at least of some interest).

D Lester (1993). A test of a social deviancy theory of suicide using the foreign born. Psychological reports, 73(1), 58-58.

Other uncited articles were general articles in job-oriented journals such as

D Lester (1986). The suicidal person: Recognition and helping Police J. 59, 216-221

Some were in proceedings from conferences, books that are rarely read, such as

D Lester, ME Murrell (1983). The influence of strict handgun laws on suicidal behavior in the USA. Depression and Suicide: Aspects Medicaux, Psychologiques et Socio-Culturels…

Others were editorials, chapters in books, and articles in foreign journals such as Journal of Islamic Countries Organization of Forensic Medicine, South African Journal of Psychology, and Giornale Italiano di Suicidologia.

          What is interesting to note in that there are some journals that had many of my uncited articles including Crisis and Suicidology Online, indicating perhaps that either the major scholars in the field do not peruse these journals or that abstracting services do not flag these articles. The lack of citations for articles in the European Journal of Psychiatry is surprising.

D Lester (1991). Are the societal correlates of suicide and homicide rates the same for each lethal weapon? A study of European nations. European Journal of Psychiatry 5, 5-8.

          What have researchers missed? One of the articles never cited was on suicide in prisoners, suggesting that some populations are of less interest than others.

MS Heller, SM Ehrlich, D Lester. (1985). Suicidal history of defendants and offenders. Journal of general psychology 112(2), 221-223.

Some topics are also of less interest to researchers, and perhaps some countries.

D Lester (1994). Suicide and Anti-Semitism: The Suicides of Stefan Zweig and Otto Weininger. Journal of Psychology & Judaism 18, 249-258.

A Czabański, D Lester. (2013). Suicide among Polish officers during World War II in Oflag II-C Woldenberg. Psychological Reports 112, 727-731.

EJD Wilde, D Lester. (2002). Social protests and rates of personal violence in the Netherlands. Archives of suicide research 6(3), 249-255.

          However, all is not lost. My most cited article in Psychological Reports had 175 citations as of April 2021, but it was not on suicide. Perhaps you should check my one-page notes on suicide?

D Lester Measuring Maslow's hierarchy of needs (2013). Psychological reports 113(1), 15-17.Citations: 175

 

My Google Scholar Account!

 I have cleaned up my Google Scholar account for the last time!!!!! 

On April 24, I had 2716 entries, and when you correct one (let's say number 2000), the website returns you to the first 20 entries, and you have start scrolling down all over again. It should return you to the one you've just corrected so that you don't have to scroll down again.

In the old days, there was another David Lester (at Rutgers University) who conducted research alcoholism, and we occasionally published in the same journal (e.g., Journal of Studies on Alcohol). I eliminated his articles from my account. Now there is another D. Lester who works on stochastic processes and related topics and whose articles are appearing in my account.

Plus many incorrect citations. Enough! As of April 24, it was correct. (It's probably got errors again already.)

The end of suicidology continued

 

THE END OF SUICIDOLOGY CONTINUED 

David Lester

          I am well-known for claiming that we have reached the end of suicidology (Lester, 2000, 2019). By this, I mean that I do not think that researchers and theoreticians will advance our understanding of why people die by suicide. There are several aspects to this.

Suicide is Statistically Rare

          First, suicide is statistically rare (Lester, 1994). Rare events are very difficult to predict. However, there are rare events in the physical world (such as hurricanes and lightning strikes) that are rare, but their mechanisms of development are understood.

Too Many Articles Published

          Second, the literature of suicide is becoming so large that a comprehensive view of it is not possible. In my four books entitled Why People Kill Themselves, I reviewed every work on suicide that I could find from 1897 to 1997. I used abstracts from every discipline. I don’t think any one person could do this anymore. I just now downloaded the articles on suicide and self-harm from SafetyLit[1] for May 2, 2021, and there were 106 articles listed. In 52 weeks, that would extrapolate to 5,512 articles in 2021.

Obscure and Low Prestige Journals

          I am not sure that SafetyLit searches all the possible journal domains: anthropology, gender studies, media studies, criminal justice studies, etc. Furthermore, many academic institutions and researchers frown on predatory journals (that is, those that charge a fee[2]), and most of those articles are not included in abstracting services. However, this does not mean that none of them are making a useful contribution to the field.

          For example, my cohort theory of suicide (Lester, 1984) proposed that each cohort of the population born may have only a limited number of potential suicides. If this cohort has a high suicide rate early in life, then it will have a low suicide rate later in life, and vice versa. I found this theory in an article by Uematsue (1961) published in Acta Medica et Biologica which is not a commonly perused journal. (An article by M. Uematsue in 1961 is listed in PubMed, but it is not his article on suicide.)

          If we are seriously interested in studying suicide, then some person or team might profitably search predatory journals for articles on suicide. The most prestigious journals often refuse to publish innovative and short articles on topics. In the good old days, the two journals Psychological Reports and Perceptual & Motor Skills, published by Robert and Carol Ammons, would often publish an article on a new idea, and this idea would appear in the prestigious journal many years later with more substantial research supporting it. The original idea, however, would be in the Ammons’s journals.[3]

Low Levels of Suicidality

          It has often been argued that an understanding of suicidal ideation or of suicide attempts may not advance our knowledge of those who die by suicide. The best that can be said is that the three groups have a limited, quite small overlap in causative factors. Lester, et al. (1979 proposed how this problem might be overcome (by dividing a sample of attempted suicides into groups by the level of their suicide intent and then extrapolating to completed suicides), but their proposal has received very little attention. Recently, I argued that suicidologists should focus on completed suicides (Lester, 2021). 

A Small Test of My Hypothesis

          Of course, those 106 articles in the May 2, 2021, issue of SafetyLit are only a miniscule sample of the literature on suicide that will appear in 2021. However, was anything useful published, useful, that is, for furthering our understanding on completed suicide?

A suicide had a rust stain on his finger from the gun

Suicides who used poisoning differed in age and sex from those using other methods. Omitting suicides by poisoning, 16% of those using other methods tested positive for opioids.

Barriers to transitioning from the ER to outpatient treatment

Pediatricians asking parents about safe gun storage

Patients with major depression, with and without suicidal ideation, differed in their core structural network connectome as noted in the MRIs;

Incarceration of parents and substance misuse contributed to planning suicide in young African Americans

On an addiction recovery program

Zero genetic influence in attempted suicides using genome-wide association

A case of suicide using a table saw

Contact with a suicide prevention worker reduced subsequent risk of attempted suicide in veterans

          I’m getting tired already. For all those articles from 1897 to 1997, I had a3-by-5 card filled out! So, far two of the ten articles are on completed suicide but are of little or no interest. Let me focus on those that remain on the list that seem to be on completed suicide.

A protocol for a study not yet carried out!!!!

Best practices for psychological autopsies

Two premature studies on COVID and suicide (good studies will not be possible for a year or two)

Comment with no data on pesticides and suicide

The death rate in those who ingest pesticides

A comment on someone else’s article on the trends in poisoning suicides in Canada – could it be due to misclassification?

Suicide rates by veterans by area (zip code) affected by variables such as latitude, hours of sunshine, rates of firearm ownership, etc.

A case of suicide after taking Dextromethorphan

News coverage of suicide in Brazil

News coverage of suicide in India

Youth suicide on the rise in Malawi

Review of suicide during epidemics of infectious diseases: little robust evidence

Celebrity suicides result in a rise in suicides in the next few days in South Korea

How to reduce suicide in veterans transitioning out of the military

An attempt to predict the impact of California’s Mental Health Services Act on suicides. No impact was predicted (This was not a direct study of its impact)

Only white American are less likely to die by suicide after a mental health visit

Patients with primary malignant bone tumors have a higher risk of suicide

Editorial: opioid addicts have a high rate of suicide

Reason for medical students in India to die by suicide (such as academic stress)

In Massachusetts, Workers in occupations with higher injury and illnesses rates and more job insecurity had higher rates of deaths of despair

A comment of an article reporting three suicides using sodium nitrite

An increased suicide mortality rate was associated with weight loss in the year before a suicide

          I did not expect any startling discoveries or new ideas, and there were not any.

          Perhaps it would be better to study a suicidology journal. Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior is edited by Thomas Joiner, and 32%-45% of the articles in that journal in recent years have been on Joiner’s Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (Hjelmeland & Knizek, 2020) which raises ethical issues. Let us look at one issue of the Archives of Suicide Research (2021, issue 1), a journal which has less bias.

LGBTQ youth have higher rates of suicidal ideation and behavior: a review

Problems in adult attachment are associated with suicidal ideation: a review

Experience of racial discrimination in Africa-American men is associated with suicidal ideation

Race/ethnic groups who die by suicide differ in substance abuse, physical health and relationship problems

Greater social support is associated with less suicidal ideation in prisoners

Suicidal ideation predicts later attempted suicide in veterans

Emotion dysregulation predicts suicidal ideation in veterans

Lack of optimism, as well as perceived burdensomeness, predicted suicidal ideation in inpatient adolescents

An education program for clinicians increased their knowledge about self-harm in the elderly

          Only one study is on suicide (and that studied distal variables by the method used for suicide), and all of the variables studied have been known for a long time to be associated with suicidal ideation and attempts.

Discussion

           I realize that I chose a very small sample of articles on suicide. A complete perusal of the thousands of articles in abstract services on suicide for 2021 might reveal a new theory or hypothesis about those who die by suicide, but I’m not optimistic.

          Grants will be awarded, publications appear, academics will be tenured and promoted as a result, both predatory and non-predatory journals will make money, etc., but we won’t be any closer to understanding suicide. Yes, I am  a pessimist, but also I wish I had been able to keep scouring the literature after 1997 to see if there was a jewel out there waiting to be discovered, read and brought to the attention of us all.

References

Hjelmeland, H., & Knizek, B. L. (2020). The emperor’s new clothes! Death Studies, 44, 168-178

Lester, D. (1984). Suicide risk by birth cohort. Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, 14, 132-136.

Lester, D. (1994). Reflections on the statistical rarity of suicide. Crisis, 15, 187-188.

Lester, D. (2000). The end of suicidology. Crisis, 21, 158-159.

Lester, D. (2019).  The end of suicidology. Hauppauge, NY: Nova.

Lester, D. (2021). Suicidologists should stop studying non-lethal suicidal behavior. Suicide Studies, 2(1), 24-25.

Lester, D., Beck, A. T. & Mitchell, B. (1979). Extrapolation from attempted suicides to completed suicides: a test. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 78-80.

Uematsue, M. (1961). A statistical approach to the host factor of suicide in adolescence. Acta Medica et Biologica, 8, 279-286.

 

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[1] www.safetylit.org/archive.htm

[2] Some prestigious charge submission and publication fees too.

[3] It used to be a joke that you get one point for every article published, except for articles published in the Ammons’s journal for which you get a point deducted.

Understanding a Suicide Versus Understanding Suicide

 

Understanding a Suicide Versus Understanding Suicide 

David Lester

            Research and theory in suicidology are concerned with understanding suicide and, most of time, do a pretty good job of this. Durkheim’s (1897) classification of four types of suicides (or cultures and subcultures) has been cited extensively and applied to many situations, such as suicide terrorists who have been classified as altruistic by many commentators, perhaps erroneously (Lester, 2021). Joiner’s (2005) Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS), although criticized, is the most studied theory in the 21^st century and typically receives empirical support.

            A researcher might take a sample of individuals, say college students, and give them a measure of suicidal ideation, thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness and the acquired capability for self-harm, and find the positive correlations as predicted by the theory. It looks like we may have contributed to an understanding of suicide.

            But……

            First of all, social science is not a science. Chemicals dissolve, explode, combine, etc. Objects on earth obey gravity. Even light waves obey gravity - hence we can see stars that are behind objects such as the moon. Physics and chemistry are sciences. Psychology and sociology are not sciences. Every result has a probability of being correct and also of being wrong. So social facts are not the same as physical science facts. Newton did not say, if I let go of this apple, I am 95% certain that it will drop.

            Second, research in suicidology, like research into other psychological and sociological topics, is a game. Look at how many useless articles have appeared in 2020 and 2021 on covid-19. Researchers saw an opportunity for a quick article, enhance their resumé and improve their chances for tenure and promotion. Do we really need competing fear of covid-19 scales, let alone one? Only the researchers developing vaccines (chemists and biologists) performed useful work. The same is true of most suicide research. Let me get a sample, administer several tests of risk factor for suicide, and publish the results. Another paper, but no contribution to even understanding suicide.

            Third, there is a difference between research and real life. Lester and Gunn (2021) studied the lives of 72 famous suicides, famous enough to have biographies written about them. The research found that perceived burdensomeness was not common in the motivations for their suicides. It was found in only 15.3% of the cases. However, there were cases which conformed to Joiner’s theory, Jerzy Kosinski for example. Does the IPTS explain Kosiński’s suicide? Read his biography, or my essay based on the biography, and you will see that his life was far more complex than three psychological constructs.

            Recently, I have been working on a new book on Katie’s Diary (Lester, 2004). Because I could not get volunteers to write a chapter applying the IPTS to Katie, I wrote the chapter. It was possible to find passages in Katie’s diary that supported all of the constructs proposed by the IPTS: thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness and the acquired capability for self-harm. However, on reading the other chapters submitted for the new book, I realized how the IPTS did not account for Katie’s suicide. Yes, those three constructs were present, but I still wondered why she choose suicide.

            The other chapters, written more from a phenomenological point of view, made her suicide much more understandable. Katie’s mind and social surround were so much more complex than three simple constructs. In the first book on Katie, one contributor explored the role of God in Katie’s life and death, another her irrational thinking, and another the voices in her mind that communicated with her. In the current book in preparation, contributors discuss Katie’s life and suicide from the perspectives of Gestalt psychology, transactional analysis, and meaning-making (the establishment of an internal order of the world which gives a feeling of predictability and control). As I read and edited those chapters, I felt that I had a much better understanding of why Katie choose to die by suicide. I even developed the feeling that her suicide was inevitable, a feeling I did not get from my chapter on the IPTS.

            Therefore, we are skilled in playing the game of research apparently oriented toward understanding suicide. But individual suicides are too complex to be understandable based solely on that research.

References

Durkheim, E. (1897). Le suicide. Paris, France: Felix Alcan.

Joiner, T. E. (2005). Why people die by suicide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lester, D. (2004). Katie’s diary. New York: Brunner-Routledge.

Lester, D. (2021). Suicide terrorists and terrorism. Hauppauge, NY: Nova.

Lester, D., & Gunn, J. F. (in press). Perspectives on a Young Woman's Suicide: A Study of a Diary

 

Thoughts on Google Scholar

  

Thoughts on Google Scholar

David Lester

            I frequently download my Google Scholar listing of articles and citations and endeavour to edit and correct it. There are often so many errors: articles I did not write, volume and page numbers of journal articles missing, and I dislike entries that are ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

            What is my most cited article? It doesn’t have the word suicide in the title, but our 1974 article on the hopeless scale now has 6,224 citations.

            But what is more surprising is that some articles received no citations while others have received citations. I write so much and, at the time of writing the articles, I gave no thought to their importance. I wrote for the fun of it. Could I get an article in this new journal? Could I get an article from these data? Even in graduate school days in the 1960s, a friend accused me of “cluttering up the literature.”

Beck, A. T., Weissman, A., Lester, D., & Trexler, L. The measurement of pessimism: the hopelessness scale. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 1974, 42, 861-865.

            6,224 citations: that is not surprising.

Lester, D., Narkunski, A., Burkman, J., & Gandica, A. An exploratory study of correlates of success in a vocational training program for ex-addicts. Psychological Reports, 1975, 37, 1212-1214.

            I was asked to help out with their training program, and I knew Psychological Reports would take the article, but 7 citations. I’m shocked. It seems to have been of interest.

Wahlgren, K., & Lester, D. The big four personality in dogs. Psychological Reports, 2003, 92, 828

            Again, I wrote this one page note just for fun, and it has 10 citations. For some of these articles with citations, I am tempted to see where and how they was cited. Did someone really find them provocative?

            Since I knew the suicide literature well up to 1997 through my obsessive reviews of the literature (4 editions of Why People Kill Themselves), I knew that some of my notes were the first article on the topic, such as

Lester, D. Anomie and the suicidal individual. Psychological Reports, 1970, 26, 532.

That has 5 citations. But these following articles (among hundreds) have no citations! Did nobody find the topic of interest and did the articles stimulate no further research? Of course, sometimes the journal is responsible – very few people peruse them. But the topics seemed interesting to me, even important.

Czabanski, A., & Lester, D. Suicide among Polish officers during World War II in Oflag-II-C Woldenberg. Psychological Reports, 2013, 112, 727-731.

Lester, D. The murder of women around the world. EuroCriminology, 1996, 10, 155-157.

Lester, D. Suicide and anti-semitism. Journal of Psychology & Judaism, 1994, 18, 249-258.

Lester, D. Symbolism in the Chinese language. International Journal of Symbology, 1974, 5(1), 18-21.

            It is most welcome that we don’t know how our articles will be received as we write and submit it or else we might never finish and publish them.

Will suicide rates rise or decline during the pandemic?

 

Will Suicide Rates Rise or Decline During the Pandemic? 

David Lester

          There has been much speculation as to whether suicide rates will rise during the current pandemic resulting from Covid-19, and there have been some articles already looking at preliminary data on suicides in limited regions and on non-fatal suicidal behavior (attempts and ideation).

          It is easy to explain why suicide rates may rise.

·        The lockdown ordered by governments has resulted in increased in stress as people adapt to their new living conditions.

·        Working from home eliminates many, if not most, of the social contacts people have. Working in an office or large enterprise provides a large number of social interactions.

·        People often experience depression in the Winter season (seasonal affective depression), and part of this is a result of being shut-in at home during the cold and snowy weather. The pandemic has resulted in people being restricted to their homes.

·        There has been tremendous economic hardship as a result of workers being laid off and businesses closing. The response of governments (through stimulus checks, banning evictions, etc.) has been helpful, but far from adequate.

·        Those who worked away from home or left home for education are now at home, and interpersonal tensions may rise. Hotlines have reported an increase in the frequency of domestic violence resulting from this.

·        With millions of deaths from the pandemic, there have tens of million bereaved people who have to deal with this loss, a loss occurring under terrible conditions, such as isolation from their dying loved-ones in order to prevent the spread of the virus.

It is, therefore, not surprising if the mental health of people has worsened during the pandemic and, perhaps, suicidal behavior has increased.

          Why might suicide rates decline during the pandemic. One of the neglected theories in suicidology has been that of Henry and Short (1954). Their theory is complex, with both sociological and psychological components. The component most relevant to the pandemic is where to what people attach blame for their misery.

          Henry and Short argued that, if people have a clear external cause to blame for their misery and unhappiness, then they will be angry and direct their aggression outwards. In contrast, if individuals have no clear external cause to blame for their misery, then they will blame themselves for their misery. Something is defective in them that accounts for their unhappiness. Then they will be more likely to become suicidal.

          I have used this idea to explain the suicide of people who have been given their eyesight or hearing back after long period of blindness and deafness. When they were blind and unhappy, they knew why they were unhappy. When their vision was restored and they remained unhappy, then there was no external cause to blame for this unhappiness and, therefore, no hope for happiness.

          I used the idea to explain why countries and regions of countries had higher suicide rates when the quality of life in those regions was higher. A higher quality of life in a region provides fewer external causes to blame for one’s misery.

          The pandemic has provided clear external causes to blame for our unhappiness. There is the virus, an inadequate government response, and limitations to our lives created by the efforts that governments did make, such as closing restaurants, gyms and movie theaters. Therefore, people became angry, as evidenced by the protests and demonstrations around the world against government restrictions and lockdowns.

          Did the suicide rate rise or decline in the year 2020? We can predict an increase, a decrease, and no change at all. Clearly, it will have to be a post-hoc “prediction.”

Suicidologists should stop studying non-lethal suicidal behavior

 

Suicidologists Should Stop Studying Non-Lethal Suicidal Behavior

 

David Lester

 

            An alternative title could be: The Method of Substitute Subjects Has No Value for Understanding Suicide. The method of substitute subjects as a term was coined for suicidologists by Neuringer (1962). Because suicides are deceased and, so cannot be given the standardized tests and interviews developed by psychologists, Neuringer suggested turning to the study of those who have suicidal ideation or who have attempted suicide – substitute subjects The majority of studies on suicide, therefore, use suicide ideators and attempters as the subjects for research.

 

            I would argue that this is great for getting publications, academic success and grants, but almost totally useless for understanding suicide.

 

            You might argue that we are interested in suicide ideators and attempters themselves, and this is, of course, true, but they are not as interesting as suicides and will not help us to understand suicides. Let me give an example.

 

            Joiner’s (2005) Interpersonal Theory of Suicide proposes that thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness are behind every suicide. Almost all of the research of this theory uses living subjects and, indeed, often scores on scales to measure these two constructs are associated positively with a measure of suicidality. This has been found in samples of psychiatric patients (Teismann, et al., 2016) and undergraduate students (Lockman & Servaty-Seib, 2016).

 

            But studies of suicide notes and suicides find that there is little evidence that perceived burdensomeness plays a role in more than15% of the suicides (Gunn, et al., 2012; Lester & Gunn, 2021). How is this possible?

 

            Giving undergraduate students Joiner’s test of perceived burdensomeness (which provides scores in the range of x-x) does not mean that their scores will be high. Almost all of the students may obtain low scores. Thus, the researcher is basically comparing students with very low scores to students with somewhat low scores. If a Likert-type scale is used (with scores ranging from -3 to +3), nearly all the students might have negative scores. The correlation, therefore, between perceived burdensomeness and suicidal ideation is difficult to interpret. If you strongly disagree that you are a burden to others, you are less suicidal than if you somewhat disagree that you are a burden. This does not help us understand those who die by suicide.

 

            This is not relevant only to Joiner’s IPTS theory of suicide. It applies to the defeat-entrapment theory of suicide, the cognitive distortion theory, and all theories. I used Joiner’s theory only because myself and John Gunn have studied suicides from the point of view of Joiner’s theory and found that perceived burdensomeness is rare in suicides.

 

            These is perhaps a way out of this problem. In two paper (Lester, et al., 1975, 1979), I argued that researchers could use attempted suicides to learn about if suicide, if and only if they categorized the attempters into groups by their level of lethality or their level of suicide intent. They could then extrapolate to those who died by suicide, and I illustrated this technique with demographic variables (e.g., sex) and hopelessness scores. It is rare that this procedure is used.

 

            Grants are awarded and academics are tenured and promoted on the basis of their research on living suicidal and non-suicidal individuals, but suicide remains a puzzle, difficult to predict and difficult to understand.

 

References

 

Gunn, J. F., Lester, D., Haines, J., & Williams, C. L. (2012). Thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness in suicide notes. Crisis, 33, 178-181.

Joiner, T. E. (2005). Why people die by suicide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lester, D., Beck, A. T. & Mitchell, B. (1979). Extrapolation from attempted suicides to completed suicides: a test. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 78-80

Lester, D., Beck, A. T. & Trexler, L. (1975). Extrapolation from attempted suicides to completed suicides. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 84, 563-566.

Lester, D., & Gunn, J. F. (2021). Is perceived burdensomeness present in the lives of famous suicides? Death Studies, in press.

Lockman, J. D., & Servaty-Seib, H. (2016). College student suicidal ideation. Death Studies, 40, 154-164.

Neuringer, C. (1962). Methodological problems in suicide research. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 26, 273-278

Teismann, T., Forkmann, T., Rath, D., Glaesmer, H., & Margraf, J. (2016). Perceived burdensomeness and suicide ideation in adult outpatients receiving exposure therapy for anxiety disorders. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 85, 1-5.

 

David's rat research

 

David’s Rat Research

 David Lester

          When I refer to my graduate student days, I usually mention that I ran rats as a hobby. (My dissertation research was on suicidal behavior.) The psychology department bought me my first few batches of rats and paid for the shavings and food. Thereafter, I bred them myself. One year, we lived in an apartment with no one else in the building, and so I brought the rats home and kept them in a spare bedroom.

          My major interest was their exploratory behavior, and I tested a theory that mild levels of anxiety increased their exploratory behavior, while stronger levels of anxiety inhibited their exploratory behavior. Indeed, I got a small NIMH grant for young researchers to pursue the research, and I published some two dozen papers on the topic.

Lester, D. (1967). Exploratory behavior of dominant and submissive rats. Psychonomic Science, 9, 285-286.

Lester, D. (1968). Effects of habituation to fear on the exploratory behavior of rats. Nature, 220, 932.

          I never really liked Skinner’s theory of learning. Of course, the theory explains simple behaviors but, as I used to tell my students, it didn’t even fully explain the interesting behavior in rats! In fact, talking with Abraham Maslow (I was his teaching assistant) led me to my research on whether there were self-actualized rats, that is, rats who were good at everything – better explorers, better learners, etc.

          I remember in particular two of my rats. I was teaching them to turn left in a T-shaped maze for a food reward with four trials each day. They all learned this task. But one rat, on the first trial each day, would turn right but keep his back paws outside of the turn (so that I could not drop a guillotine door behind him because he did not meet my criterion of all four paws in the corridor). He would sniff the air, decide that there was no food there, back up carefully and then enter the left corridor. On the next three trials that day, he turned left, left and left. He did that every day. He was checking whether that I had switched the food on him.

          The other rat used speed. On the first trial of the day, he would zip into the right corridor and zip out, evading the descending door. Then he would go left for the rest of the day. I never was quick enough to catch him in the right-hand corridor.

          They never were rewarded for this behavior, but they persisted in checking on me. In later research, I found and reported in a published article that the quickest learners were also the best explorers. I meant to go on and see if they excelled at other tasks, but a job offer from Gene Brockopp to work at the suicide prevention center in Buffalo ended my rat research.

          There are other interesting aspects to the research. The maze I used was about three feet up from the floor and, occasionally, rats would back up in fear and fall off the equipment. I discarded their data because this might have changed their anxiety level which I was manipulating. I always reported in my published reports that x rats fell off the equipment, and their data were discarded. I never found any other researcher on exploratory behavior in rats reporting that their rats fell of the equipment. I’m sure that their rats fell too, but the researchers never bothered to report this.

          I also replicated a study by another research on exploratory behavior in blinded rats. (They were white rats.) Blinding my rats was so traumatic for me that I decided to never do any physiological research on rats again. None of my fellow graduate students went to see my blinded rats, and I concluded that, rather than enucleation being symbolic of castration (a Freudian hypothesis), castration was symbolic of enucleation and, therefore, more anxiety arousing! By the way, the research showed that blinding had no impact on the rats’ exploratory behavior – because they do not use vision but rather their whiskers and sense of smell.

Lester, D. (1967). Exploratory behavior in peripherally blinded rats. Psychonomic Science, 8, 7-8.

 

David as a Survivor

 

David as a Survivor

David Lester

          I have worked with two survivors for scholarly papers, Donna Barnes and Denise Pazur, and I should like to thank them sincerely for working with me.

          I have had a colleague at the university died by suicide, but he and I were not close. Then, one day, out of the blue, an e-mail arrived from a woman who had read my book Fixin’ to Die. She was a chronic suicide attempter and was planning to die by suicide. She thought I’d understand. I e-mailed back, but I was cautious. Perhaps this was a prank, and the writer was not whom she seemed to be. Eventually, however, I knew that she was authentic. She lived near Canterbury, England, and was a 22-year-old woman.

          I decided that I would try to “save her.” I purchased Tom Ellis’s book Choosing to Live and sent it to her. (That is how I learned her address.) I also sent her articles on irrational thinking, and she responded that she did not think irrationally! One day, after a few months, her e-mails stopped. Two weeks later, I received an e-mail asking whether I was angry. She had attempted suicide again. (Of course, I was not angry, I assured her.) We exchanged many more e-mails, some humorous. And then they stopped for good.

          I was visiting England a few months later, and I stopped by the town where she lived. I had trouble finding her address initially, went to the local police station, and asked if they knew of her suicide. They had not. When I finally located her apartment, I write a note and dropped it through the mail slot.

          A few weeks later, I got an e-mail from her sister who asked who I was. I explained, and I gave her enough details about her sister to convince her that we had e-mailed a great deal and grown close. Her sister then told me that she had attempted suicide again. The local health agency was checking on her every day, and so they saved her and placed her in a psychiatric hospital. The hospital took her off suicide watch after a week, whereupon she hung herself in the ward. That hurt. She was afraid of hanging herself, but she knew that she would have to, she told me, because they kept saving her after overdoses.

          I wrote to Tom feeling incompetent, and he replied with reassurance. My trying to save her was like trying to save an alcoholic with a birthday card, he said.

          Why am I writing this? Because I have never analyzed her or written a scholarly article about her. I had kept all of the e-mails and information I had about her, and I destroyed them. It was too personal for me to be analytical about her.

          I’m old now. I had forgotten her name. I found three photographs that she had sent me and that I had kept, and they had her name: Vicki.

          This is why I am immensely grateful to Denise and Donna for letting me work with them. I know how hard that must have been.

References

Barnes, D. H., Lawal-Solarin, F. W., & Lester, D. Letters from a suicide. Death Studies, 2007, 31, 671-678.

Barnes, D. H., Pazur, D., & Lester, D. Parents’ views of their child’s death by suicide. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 2014, 22, 181-193.

Ellis, T. E., & Newman, C. Choosing to live. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 1996.

Lester, D. Fixin’ to die: a compassionate guide ot committing suicide or staying alive. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2003.

Lester, D., & Barnes, D. H. Survivors and researchers collaborate. Surviving Suicide, 2007, 19(2), 10-11.

 

Serendipity

 

SERENDIPITY

 

David Lester

 

          How did we get where we are? There is nature (our genes) and nurture (our experiences), of course. But there is also serendipity, completely unpredictable events that have a major impact on one’s life. What serendipitous events helped me to be where I am?

 

          Romance, for one. Meeting a 17-year-old girl at summer school in France in 1963 and falling in love with her was a huge event by itself, but also a serendipitous event. We never married, but her parents sponsored me as an immigrant to the USA so that I came on a green card. I would have remained in England had it not been for meeting Mary.

 

          And Bijou, of course. I never went to division meetings at the college, but I was bored in September 1985, and so I went. I needed an economist to write a chapter in a book on the death penalty, and there she was, an econometrician from the University of Pennsylvania. Bijou changed my life personally and professionally. I had almost given up suicide research, and I never went to professional meetings. All that changed drastically. For example, I published 31 articles in 1985 before I met Bijou, 71 in 1987 and 97 in 1988. I went to my first annual meeting of the American Association of Suicidology in 1987 wearing my newly purchased suit, and I was President of the International Association for Suicide from 1991 to 1995.

 

          The psychology department at Cambridge University focused on experimental psychology. One day, sitting in the department library I saw a book Clues to Suicide by Ed Sheidman and Norm Farberow. It shouldn’t have been there. The department was not interested in those kinds of topics. I took it and looked at the 33 pairs of suicide notes at the back, each consisting of one genuine note and one simulated note. It seemed to me that I could correctly choose the genuine one easily, although I never formally checked that. Years later, when I was asked to choose a topic for my dissertation, I said SUICIDE because of that book. (Sidebar: Ed and I never got along!)

 

          In England, one applies to one university and only one. I choose Cambridge University. (That gave me the choice of five colleges there to rank order in preference, and I made St. John’s College my first choice of the five.) When I emigrated to the USA, I applied to one university – the University of California at Berkeley. That was it. One day, the bulletin board in the psychology department had an advertisement from Brandeis University offering scholarships for foreign students. Why not apply there too? I did. My supervisor of studies (Alan Welford) and I had never heard of Brandeis University. I didn’t know it was primarily a Jewish university. I looked up the faculty. We had never heard of Abraham Maslow or the other professors there. Brandeis offered me a generous fellowship (a Charles Revson Fellowship – of Revlon cosmetics fame), and Berkeley said that, maybe, there would be financial support. I chose to go to Brandeis. The psychology department at Brandeis let me choose my dissertation topic (suicide) and, in addition, allowed me to run rat research for fun (and paid for the rats and supplies) and to publish scholarly works as a graduate student. I met Maslow, became his TA, and had him on my dissertation committee. Hence my only NIMH grant (for rat research) and my multiple self theory of personality (a theory of the mind).

 

          There are other events about which I’ve questioned their serendipity, but one expects to catch the flu occasionally. One expects to run into interesting researchers at conferences and later collaborate with them. One doesn’t expect to go to summer school in France and end up in the USA. That is serendipity!

My Debt to Hans Eysenck

 

My Debt to Hans Eysenck 

David Lester

          It used to be, and probably still is, that a mention of Hans Eysenck, at least in the United States, would cause other psychologists to roll their eyes. He wasn’t liked, and often not respected as a psychologist. Yes, he was testy and always replied to articles that were critical of his research. He took unpopular positions, such as the genetic basis for personality traits, including intelligence. (My senior thesis advisor, Alice Heim, used to argue that intelligence is best viewed as a personality trait, not as some indispensable ability that enables one to survive in this world.) And, of course people like to gloat over cases where his collaborators might have invented their data (Pelosi, 2019). But I owe Hand Eysenck a debt, maybe two debts.

          It is unusual to change majors in England. We specialize at the age of 16, and I chose physics, chemistry and mathematics. That is all one studies for the next two or three years. (It’s three years if you want to go to Oxbridge.) Part 1 of my BA degree is in physics and mathematics for I had dropped chemistry at university. After a year and a half, I had a crisis. Was I good enough to be a physicist? One cannot change majors to anything that is taught in high school, for one would be 4½ years behind. That left the social sciences. I choose psychology.

          I went to the library and got a book on psychology, about which I knew nothing. It sounded interesting. The book was dated about 1920. My Director of Studies (Alan Welford) wrote back immediately telling me not to read it! He suggested books by Eysenck. Uses and Abuses of Psychology, Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, and Fact and Fiction in Psychology. Eventually I read them all, and they convinced me that I had not made a drastic mistake in changing majors, and they helped me withstand the first few lectures on physiological psychology (by Lawrence Weiskrantz). I didn’t learn how to spell emigdala (amygdala) for another year.

          Eysenck’s books are interesting, scientific, and relevant. He hated psychoanalysis, which I have come to appreciate (and believe in), and I do use some of his examples to ridicule psychoanalysis in my lectures when I am covering other perspectives. In my research and theorizing, I have used Eysenck’s theories and his personality inventory. They have great value. My advice to those who roll their eyes when Eysenck’s name in mentioned, is make more of an effort to be as successful and important a psychologist as he was.

          My second debt was to Eysenck is in his role as editor of Personality & Individual Differences, his journal. Over the years, he accepted many of my papers and encouraged my research. Yes, of course, he was eager for citations, and it was important to cite his papers in one’s articles. In this, however, he was way ahead of his time, for now citations are critical for academic success in the better universities. Recently, it has been suggested that Google Scholar citations, one’s h-index and one’s i10-index should be part of any application for an academic position, tenure or promotion.

          I intended to visit him in London and make his personal acquaintance, but he died (in 1997) before I made good on my intention. I always showed an interview with him in my course on theories of personality, and that is as close as I got to Hans Eysenck. But I remain in his debt.

Reference

Pelosi, A. J. (2019). Personality and fatal diseases. Journal of Health Psychology, 24, 421-439.

Suicides at Guantanamo Bay

 

Suicides at Guantanamo Bay[1]

 David Lester

          The detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay has handled 771 individuals for varying amount of time, of whom 629 arrived in 2002 and 40 remain as of September 2020. There have been 9 deaths of prisoners recorded at the detention center, of which 7 have been labelled as suicides. There have however, been questions raised as to whether these deaths were really suicides rather than homicides or deaths resulting from torture at the hands of the staff (Horton, 2010). Some military officials labelled these suicides as acts of war by jihadists seeking martyrdom (Savage, 2011).

          Three of these suicides occurred in 2006 (apparently in a suicide pact using hanging), one in 2007, one in 2009, one in 2011, and one in 2012. To calculate a suicide rate, the years 2002 to 2019 were included, and the average population in June and July used. The average population per year for the 18-year period was 266.8, with an average of 0.39 suicides per year, giving a suicide rate of 8.10 per 100,000 per year.

          There were many attempted suicides at the prison, mostly by overdosing on medication, but also by hanging and cutting, with more than 120 reported by the end of 2004, as well as many more acts of self-harm.[2] One prisoner was reported as having made 12 serious suicide attempts. There were also hunger strikes by prisoners to protest their treatment (Savage, 2011).

References

Horton, S. (2010). "The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle". Harper's Magazine. Archived from the original on January 18, 2010.

Savage, C. (2011). As acts of war or despair, suicides rattle a prison. New York Times, April 24, online.

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[1] These data come from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp_suicide_attempts