Attitudes and Perceptions of Suicide and Suicide Prevention Messages for Asian Americans

Abstract

Understanding the context of suicidal behaviors is critical for effective suicide prevention strategies. Although suicide is an important topic for Asian Americans, there is limited information about what Asian Americans’ attitudes are towards suicide and their perceptions about the effectiveness of prevention efforts. These questions are critical to examine to provide foundational knowledge for determining how best to intervene. In this study, Asian American (n = 87) and White (n = 87) participants completed self-report indexes on their knowledge of depression and suicide (e.g., estimates of suicide rates), coping attitudes (e.g., help-seeking) and suicide prevention attitudes (e.g., usefulness of PSAs). The results indicate that in comparison to Whites, Asian Americans perceived suicidal behavior to be more common, perceived a stronger link between depression and suicide, less frequently endorsed help-seeking strategies, and reported more concern or distress after viewing a suicide prevention PSA. These preliminary results also suggest the possibility of cultural differences in perceptions of suicide prevention messages. The implications of these findings are discussed with a focus on providing recommendations for exploring suicide prevention efforts for Asian Americans.

The prevalence and predictors of mental health diagnoses and suicide among U.S. college students: Implications for addressing disparities in service use

“…An important consideration is that self-reported symptoms of depression have been found to be higher among Asian American college students (Eisenberg et al, 2013). The lower likelihood of disclosure and/or diagnosis of MH problems may result from shame in having a mental illness (Augsberger et al, 2015; Thapa, Sung, Klingbeil, Lee, & Klimes-Dougan, 2015). Black students showed a lower likelihood of reporting all outcomes compared to Whites.…”

Developing Public Service Announcements to Help Prevent Suicide among Young People

“…Although the young people in the study wanted to ensure that PSAs were inclusive of different cultural groups and they had raised concerns that some messaging might not be appropriate, most of the participants in the study were Australian born who spoke English at home. Future research should target a broader range of ethnicities and cultures to make certain that PSAs are relevant and appropriate across a range of demographics [ 49 ]. The small sample size was deemed suitable to help manage any potential risks; however, as a consequence, the PSAs that were developed may not be acceptable or relevant to some groups of young people.…”

Intersectionality, social support, and youth suicidality: A socioecological approach to prevention

“…Likert scales can be reliably used in parametric analyses (Sullivan & Artino, 2013), and parametric tests are more robust for ordinal variables than non‐parametric tests (Norman, 2010). Previous suicide research has used parametric statistics for ordinal data when conceptualized as count data (Kamali et al, 2019; Thapa et al, 2015). Further, we posit that degree of intersectionality and suicidality is related and thus must be examined using their ordered values.…”