Life Trauma on Mental Health and Suicidal Behavior: History
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Subjects: Psychology
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Several studies report the incidence of traumatic experiences in community and clinical samples, and substantial research demonstrates the impact of traumatic events on mental health and suicidal behavior, but this area remains unexplored in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLC).

  • life trauma
  • traumatic experiences
  • mental health
  • suicidal behavior

1. Traumatic Experiences

The word “trauma” is commonly used to refer to a stressful event; however, each person’s individual adaptability and coping capacity is what defines whether an event is traumatic for them. Because of this, the same event may be traumatic for one person and not for another. When a situation considered traumatic exceeds a person’s coping abilities, it creates psychological trauma [1]. Several studies have reported high rates of different traumatic experiences, and the impact that trauma has on people’s physical and mental health, causing suicidal behavior. However, this issue is still not properly explored in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries.
The World Health Organization (WHO) points out that 40 million children under the age of 15 become victims of violence each year [2]. Recent data report that 3 out of 4 children between the ages of 2 and 4 years suffer from physical and/or psychological violence at home, 1 out of 5 women and 1 out of 13 men are sexually abused before the age of 20 years, and about 120 million girls and young women suffer from some type of forced sexual contact before turning 20 years old [3].
The psychological trauma resulting from a traumatic event depends on the severity of the violence and the person’s experience [2], and can vary from anxiety symptoms and fear to aggressive symptoms and externalizing anger [4], compromising both the mental and physical health of the traumatized individual [2,3].
Several studies report the incidence of exposure to traumatic events in community samples [5,6,7,8,9], clinical samples [10,11,12,13,14,15,16], and specific samples [17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Several authors report rates of traumatic experiences higher than 50% in the general population [5,21], in clinical populations, such as schizophrenic patients [15] or patients with anxiety and depression disorders [16], and in specific populations, such as institutionalized adolescents [22].
In general, the most reported traumatic experiences are emotional neglect [8,13,16,17,22,24], physical neglect [8,17,18,21,24], and the unexpected death of someone close [5,7,9,21].
Several studies have shown the impact of exposure to traumatic events on mental health, namely anxiety and depression disorders, which are the two main diagnostic categories [25]. Li and collaborators [13] found significant positive correlations between exposure to a traumatic event and anxiety levels in schizophrenic patients, and specifically found that emotional neglect and sexual abuse contribute to a higher probability of anxiety symptoms. In the study by Humphreys and collaborators [26], associations were found between child maltreatment and depressive symptoms, with the strongest correlations among those who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. Van Assche and collaborators [8] found that any childhood trauma was positively correlated with anxiety and/or depression levels, and emotional neglect and abuse were positively related with both anxiety and depressive levels. Other studies have demonstrated similar results with regard to the impact of exposure to a traumatic event on anxiety and/or depressive levels [12,22,24,27,28,29,30,31]. Another widely documented correlation is between exposure to traumatic events and suicidal behavior.

2. Suicide

Globally, more than 700,000 people die from suicide every year. A 2014 study by O’Hare and collaborators [21] found that 52.1% of participants tried to commit suicide at least once. Furthermore, a study by Hadland and collaborators [32] found that 36.8% of participants reported a history of suicidal ideation, and a study by Capuzzi and collaborators [18] found that 23.7% of participants have a history of suicide attempts.
Suicide is one of the most common causes of death, so it is extremely important to comprehend risk factors of suicide in order to have a complete and directed response for its prevention [33]. Many studies have found that exposure to a traumatic event increases the risk of suicidal behavior [6,10,13,18,21,32,34,35,36,37]. Saraçli and collaborators [24] found that the prevalence of suicidal thoughts among participants who were exposed to some traumatic event (18.3%) was nearly double that of participants without history of trauma during their childhood (9.6%). Mostly, emotional neglect or abuse and physical abuse were found to be linked with higher rates of suicidal behavior [22,38,39].

3. CPLC

The Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLC), an organization founded on 17 July 1996, comprises nine member states: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and East Timor. CPLC occupies an area of about 10.7 million square kilometers across four different continents, and has a population of nearly 250 million. It has, as general objectives, the promotion and diffusion of the Portuguese language, cooperation on several domains, and political–diplomatic concentration between its members. Some of the principles that rule de CPLC are the sovereign equality of its member states, promotion of development and mutually beneficial cooperation, and respect for national identity and territorial integrity (https://www.cplp.org; accessed on 4 February 2022).
The countries in this community share the Portuguese language and some cultural and religious issues, as well as cooperative relations at the economic, medical, and military levels. However, they have their differences in other cultural and religious aspects, as well as in the evolution of each country, namely in the economic sector, security, and daily violence. Therefore, these countries can be considered as a whole due to their similarities, but special attention must be paid to the differences between each one of them.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/bs12040102

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