Mental Health Expert - Dr. Tari Dilks

Over my past several columns, we have followed a nurse named Janice through her early career. We are going to pause that story and use this column instead to offer support during the current public health emergency. We are with you.

Everyone is under stress trying to cope with the novel coronavirus pandemic, but students are especially vulnerable: They’ve lost access to their friends, their campus communities, and the structure and rhythm of the academic year. This special collection includes some of our strongest pieces on how faculty members can help students cope. Professors, after all, are on the front lines, even if that line is now a virtual one.

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Three general types of coping (problem-focused coping, social support-seeking, and meaning-focused coping) in the transition from adolescence to early adulthood are examined. Specifically, we investigated age differences, their interdependence, and their adaptive function in respect to academic work-related stress (resilience). The present study examined these issues in a crosssectional assessment (1,608 pupils and students between 14 and 30 years). Problem-focused coping and seeking social support were positively correlated with age. Age-moderated analyses showed pronounced associations between problem-focused coping and support-seeking in adolescence, but stronger associations between problem- and meaning-focused coping in young adulthood. Seeking social support and meaning-focused coping moderated the negative correlation between subjective stress and wellbeing. Age differences and the adaptive role of coping are discussed within a developmental framework.

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Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, challenging all theories that assume a universal
drive for self-preservation. It is difficult to predict and prevent because people who consider killing themselves often are unwilling or incapable of reporting their intention. Advances in the measurement of implicit cognition provide an opportunity to test whether automatic associations of self with death can provide a behavioral marker of suicide risk. We measured implicit associations about death/suicide in 157 people presenting for treatment at a psychiatric emergency department while they awaited medical attention. Results confirmed that suicide attempters hold a significantly stronger implicit association between death/suicide and self than do psychiatrically distressed nonattempters. Moreover, the implicit association of death/suicide with self was associated with an approximately six-fold increase in the odds of making a suicide attempt in the next 6 months, exceeding the predictive validity of known risk factors (e.g., depression or suicide attempt history) and both patients’ and clinicians’ predictions. These results provide the first evidence of a behavioral marker for suicidal behavior and suggest that measures of implicit cognition may be useful for detecting and predicting sensitive clinical behaviors that are unlikely to be reported.

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