Reasons for staying alive when you are thinking of killing yourself: The Reasons for Living Inventory.

University of Washington Catholic University of AmericaStevan Lars Nielsen and John A. ChilesUniversity of WashingtonThe studies presented here describe the development of an instrument to measurea range of beliefs potentially important as reasons for not committing suicide.Sixty-five individuals generated 72 distinct reasons; these were reduced to 48 byfactor analyses performed on two additional samples, and the items were arrangedinto the Reasons for Living Inventory (RFL), which requires a rating of howimportant each reason would be for living if suicide was contemplated. In ad-dition, factor analyses indicated six primary reasons for living: Survival and Cop-ing Beliefs, Responsibility to Family, Child-Related Concerns, Fear of Suicide,Fear of Social Disapproval, and Moral Objections. The RFL was then given totwo additional samples, 197 Seattle shoppers and 175 psychiatric inpatients. Bothsamples were divided into several suicidal (ideators and parasuicides) and non-suicidal groups. Separate multivariate analyses of variance indicated that the RFLdifferentiated suicidal from nonsuicidal individuals in both samples. In the shop-ping-center sample, the Fear of Suicide scale further differentiated between pre-vious ideators and previous parasuicides. In the clinical sample, the Child-RelatedConcerns scales differentiated between current suicide ideators and current para-suicides. In both samples, the Survival and Coping, the Responsibility to Family,and the Child-Related Concerns scales were most useful in differentiating thegroups. Results were maintained when the effect of recent stress was held constant.The frequency of suicidal behavior sug- point in their lifetime; between 53% and 67%gests that it is a phenomenon that cannot be report seriously considering it.ignored. Over 25,000 individuals a year kill The majority of research in the field ofthemselves in the United States (U.S. Vital suicidology, to date, has been directed atStatistics, 1973, 1975), and it is estimated identifying characteristics of suicidal personsthat two to eight times this number, or from to enhance prediction of suicidal behavior50,000 to 200,000 persons a year parasuicide (Beck, Resnick, Kreitman,(i.e., intentionally self-injure, behavior usu- 1977;Neuringer, 1974). With few exceptionsally labeled in the U.S. as attempted suicide; (e.g., Goodstein, 1982) almost all of this workBerman, 1975). Linehan and colleagues (Li- has focused on identifying maladaptive at-nehan Linehan Linehan, Note 1) found that from 10% has been given the question of whether sui-to 16% of an adult, general population in cidal persons lack important adaptive char-Seattle report attempting suicide at some acteristics present among nonsuicidal indi-viduals, and, if so, what these characteristicsThis research was supported by National Institute might be.Grant MH34486. Focusing on adaptive, life-maintaining