Matthew Nock, an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University, is called the Suicide Implicit Association Test…īut critics question whether the test is actually practical, and up until now no one has tried to apply it to suicide prevention. This new research is testing the IAT as a way of assessing suicide risk, even if the person is denying they are suicidal.

Suicide risk is assessed on the basis of people’s actions and what they say, so a completely determined person can talk their way through a risk assessment. Some, however, may have decided that death is the only relief, or they may be unable to see clear alternatives owing to the effects of mental illness on thinking. Contrary to popular belief, suicidal patients don’t necessarily want to die, they just want the pain to stop and will be upfront if they think professionals can help. Most suicidal patients will admit they are at risk of harming themselves. In fact, the researchers featured in the Globe piece have used it to test for implicit associations between the concept of self and suicide.

However, as the test purely measures associations between concepts, it can be used to look for other implicit biases.

Most of the research has been done on implicit social biases, finding that even people who have no explicit prejudices against blondes, foreigners, men or whomever, might find they automatically associate certain negative concepts with these groups. We’ve discussed in it more detail previously but it essentially relies on the fact that if you have an pre-existing association between two concepts, say, the concepts ‘blonde’ and ‘stupid’, making similar associations will be faster than associating ‘blonde’ and ‘clever’ because you’re going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have. The test is a variant of the Implicit Association Test ( IAT) that has been used to look at our automatic associations between different concepts, based on how quickly we can categorise them. The Situationist has just alerted me to a fantastic article in the Boston Globe on the development a cognitive test for suicidal thoughts that doesn’t rely solely on the conscious mind.

Inside the mind of a suicidal person