Suicide Attempts and Faulty Decision Making

Suicide is often viewed as a bad solution to a problem. To clarify how true this is, researchers performed two separate experiments testing the process of choosing between stimuli; in one experiment, stimuli had different intrinsic values, and the other involved learning the value of stimuli through recent experience (i.e., reinforcement learning). The experiments involved 260 older adult participants who were depressed and had made a serious suicide attempt (i.e., most similar to people who died by suicide), depressed with suicidal ideation only, depressed but nonsuicidal, or nonpsychiatric controls (average ages were in the early 60s).

Compared with the other groups, the attempters group had difficulty with and took longer in learning the …