Are suicide attempters more impulsive than suicide ideators?

OBJECTIVE: For over 100 years impulsiveness has been cited as a key factor in why some people that think about killing themselves go on to attempt suicide. Yet prior studies are limited by not using experimental groups that can test this hypothesis and by treating impulsiveness as a unidimensional construct. To overcome these limitations, we compared suicide ideators and suicide attempters on several dimensions of impulsiveness. METHOD: In Study 1 we compared inpatient suicide attempters who made an attempt within the prior two weeks (n = 30), current inpatient suicide ideators (n = 31), and community controls (n = 34) on several dimensions of impulsiveness using self-report and behavioral measures. In Study 2 (n = 346), we compared three similar groups based on lifetime and past year suicidal behaviors on several of the measures in Study 1. RESULTS: In Study 1, we found only that negative urgency was clearly elevated among attempters compared with ideators. In Study 2, there were no significant differences on any impulsiveness constructs, including negative urgency. CONCLUSIONS: Results from the two studies suggest that attempters may not have significantly elevated trait impulsiveness, compared to ideators; however, attempters may have higher impulsiveness when in a negative state.