| Popis: |
Suicide is a global epidemic, and the number of suicides has continued to grow at an ever-accelerating rate for decades. In the United States, suicide is responsible for approximately 130 deaths every single day, representing the second highest cause of death for teenagers and young adults. Young men are particularly vulnerable, a group for whom effective mental health treatments can be challenging to provide, due to their gender-specific trend of shunning help-seeking behaviors. In the face of the suicide epidemic, advocacy groups and interested researchers call for new and effective treatment interventions. This dissertation seeks to answer that call for the development of brief suicide interventions by recommending a program that blends self-compassion with virtual reality targeted specifically at suicidal young men. Self-compassion, a concept that has recently been gaining popularity alongside mindfulness, is a teachable skill that carries the potential to directly mitigate the effect of depressive symptoms. Likewise, virtual reality provides an attractive and cost-efficient medium through which to teach. The treatment protocol put forth in this dissertation was informed by best practices found in the literature on suicidality, and refined by expert feedback. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu/) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu). |
