The Impact of Suicide Utility Perception on News over Terminally Ill Patients’ Suicide Attitudes: A Pilot Study

Diego Garcia-Fernández, Samuel Fernández-Salinero, Gabriele Giorgi, Gabriela Topa and Ana María Marcos Del Cano
Additional contact information
Diego Garcia-Fernández: International School of Doctorate, The National Distance University (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain
Samuel Fernández-Salinero: Psychology Department, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Gabriele Giorgi: Department of Human Science, European University of Rome, 00163 Rome, Italy
Gabriela Topa: Social and Organizational Psychology Department, The National Distance University (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain
Ana María Marcos Del Cano: Faculty of Law, The National Distance University (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 16, 1-11

Abstract: Suicide represents a very important issue in public health. For approaching attitudes toward suicide, we have developed an instrument that, following previous recommendations, assesses specific thoughts related to the perception of suicide utility in the press. First of all, we will test the psychometric properties of the scale we created ad hoc for assessing suicide utility perception. After that, we expect to find that the suicide utility perception in the press will have a statistically significant impact on positive attitudes toward terminally ill patients’ suicide (Hypothesis 1). In addition, this relationship will be mediated by suicide legitimation (Hypothesis 2). This mediation will be moderated by depressive symptomatology (Hypothesis 3). The sample was composed of 66 Spanish participants. Suicide legitimation was significantly related to the positive evaluation of terminally ill people’s euthanasia. Finally, when the levels of depression’s psychological concomitants increased, the support for terminally ill people’s euthanasia increased as well. Implications and limitations have been discussed.

Keywords: suicide; suicidal ideation; suicide risk factors; depressive symptomatology; terminally ill people’s euthanasia; euthanasia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8784/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8784/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:16:p:8784-:d:618036

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().