Identity formation in suicidal and nonsuicidal youth: The role of self-continuity

Abstract

Adolescents attempt to end their own lives with greater frequency than do either younger or older persons. The aim of this study was to provide a developmental account of this anomaly by examining the contrastive ways in which suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents reason about their own personal continuity through time. Drawing upon an earlier program of normative research into the links between a maturing sense of personal continuity and the development of a sense of commitment to the future, and capitalizing on recent methodologic advances in the study of young persons' maturing sense of self-continuity, a series of comparisons were made between 30 psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents, at varying degrees of risk to suicide, and a matched control group of their nonsuicidal agemates. The results of this study show that, while almost all of the hospitalized adolescents evidenced some degree of developmental immaturity in their attempts to reason about their own identity across time, the high-risk suicidal group was unique in their special inability to locate any grounds upon which to justify their own continuity through time. These findings are interpreted in terms of their relevance for understanding both the normal identity formation process, and for the diagnosis and treatment of adolescents at special risk to suicide.