Correlates of Non-suicidal Self-injury and Suicide Attempts in Bulimic Spectrum Disorders

• Published in: Frontiers in Psychology
• Main Authors: Alexandra Gómez-Expósito, Ines Wolz, Ana B Fagundo, Roser Granero, Trevor Steward, Susana Jiménez-Murcia, Zaida Aguera, Fernando Fernandez-Aranda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2016-08-01
• Subjects: Personality; Emotion Regulation; impulsivity; suicide attempts; Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI); bulimic spectrum disorder (BSD)
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01244/full

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the implication of personality, impulsivity, and emotion regulation difficulties in patients with a bulimic-spectrum disorder (BSD) and suicide attempts (SA), BSD patients with non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), and BSD patients without these behaviors. Method: 122 female adult BSD patients were assessed using self-report questionnaires. Patients were clustered post-hoc into three groups depending on whether they presented BSD without NSSI or SA (BSD), BSD with lifetime NSSI (BSD+NSSI) or BSD with lifetime SA (BSD+SA). Results: The BSD+NSSI and BSD+SA groups presented more emotion regulation difficulties, more eating and general psychopathology, and increased reward dependence in comparison with the BSD group. In addition, BSD+SA patients specifically showed problems with impulse control, while also presenting higher impulsivity than both the BSD and BSD+NSSI groups. No differences in impulsivity between the BSD and BSD+NSSI groups were found. Conclusions: The results show that BSD + NSSI and BSD+SA share a common profile characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation and low reward dependence, but differ in impulsivity and cooperativeness. This suggests that self-injury, in patients without a history of suicide attempts (i.e. BSD+NSSI), may have a regulatory role rather than being due to impulsivity.