COMPONENTS OF HOPELESSNESS ABOUT THE FUTURE IN PARASUICIDE

Hopelessness about the future is an important component of depression in general and suicidal behavior in particular. Despite this, little r esearch has examined the concept of hopelessness. A study is reported which adapted a verbal fluency paradigm to examine the ease with which hospitalized parasuicides, hospital controls, and nonhospital control s were able to think about future positive (things they were looking f orward to) and future negative (things they were not looking forward t o) events. The parasuicide subjects showed a deficit in being able to think of future positive events, both for the immediate future and for the longer-term future. but there were no differences between the gro ups on being able to think of future negative events. Several possible explanations of the results are discussed and some suggestions are ma de for future research.