Reasons to Live Instead of Dying by Suicide: New Insights from a Computer Assisted Content Analysis

Most research on suicide prevention focuses on the progression toward action. Fewer previous studies have looked at suicidal individuals’ past experiences with suicidality and why they did not die by suicide. Moreover, the existing use of reasons to live in assessment in treatment is generally grounded in inventories of questions that, while groundbreaking and well validated, were developed in the past century and without a focus on individuals’ lived experiences of suicidality. In the present study, we investigated reasons people lived through suicidality in a very large, naturally occurring sample of individuals’ self-reports of their experiences. Our analysis contributes categories, and themes organizing those categories, that affirm prior work and also offer new perspectives on that prior work, as well as new connections between ideas in the literatures on reasons people die, reasons people live, and subjective and psychological well-being. The present study highlights the value of computer-assisted methods as a way of achieving both scale and interpretable results, and it identifies a number of theoretical and clinical avenues for further exploration.