Cognitive flexibility and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors: Future directions and identification of targets for interventions for suicide prevention.

The relationship of emotions and cognition with suicidal and non-suicidal self-injury is important to better understand the process of self-injurious and suicidal behavior and to help develop interventions to reduce non-suicidal self-injury and improve suicide prevention.Identifying targets for suicide prevention is an NIMH priority and can help us illuminate the complicated process of emotion regulation in suicidal patients.The well-written manuscript by Chung et al. (Chung et al., 2023) in the current issue of "Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice" is a systematic review aimed to synthesize the evidence of cognitive flexibility, a set of cognitive processes, and suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB).