Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Nadorff, Michael.

Committee Member

Drapeau, Christopher.

Committee Member

Berman, Mitchell.

Date of Degree

5-6-2017

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Psychology

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Psychology

Abstract

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States, despite a wealth of research investigating suicide risk factors. Sleep disturbances are also rising, and continue to be an often undetected and untreated source of increased suicide risk. A growing body of literature has looked for connections between sleep disturbances and increased suicidality, but few studies have looked at differentiating between single and multiple suicide attempters. Further, when assessing nightmares, literature varies widely on defining and measuring symptoms of nightmares, and no known studies have compared frequency, distress/severity, and duration. Participants (n =225) were recruited via an online study conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk who reported one or more prior suicide attempts. Results show that nightmare frequency independently predicted multiple suicide attempters when controlling for symptoms of depression, PTSD, insomnia, nightmare severity/distress, and nightmare duration. Clinical implications for findings include screening and treating nightmares as a potential suicide intervention.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/16882

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