Coping, Reasons for Living, and Suicide in Black College Students

More than 33,000 people commit suicide and approximately 756,000 people attempt suicide in the United States each year (Arias, Anderson, Kung, Murphy, & Kochanek, 2003). In 2007, suicide was the third leading cause of death among 15-to 24-year-old Black Americans (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010). In addition, Black college students have been shown to attempt suicide more often than their White counterparts (Kann et al., 1998). Although there is ample research on suicidality among North Americans, most of this research has been conducted with White individuals, and investigations of suicide among Black persons are lacking. To promote Black individuals' well-being and eliminate suicide incidents, counselors need to examine the reasons underlying this increase in suicidality, as well as possible ways to prevent or reduce the number of individuals from taking their own lives. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to research positive factors that reduce the likelihood for individuals to engage in suicide behavior. More specifically, the study was designed to examine the roles of coping and reasons for living in protecting against suicide in a sample of Black college students. * Coping Stress is an inevitable aspect of daily life; however, the way an individual responds to the negative or stressful events can vary. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) theorized coping as the cognitive and behavioral efforts of an individual utilized to manage external or internal demands rising from stressful life events. Coping has been shown to play a mediator role between antecedent stressful event and psychological distress such as anxiety, depression, and suicide (Dixon, Heppner, & Anderson, 1991; Elliott, Sherwin, Harkins, & Marmarosh, 1995). How an individual appraises the situation and his or her ability to manage the situation seem to be related to the level of psychological distress the individual may experience under the circumstance. Fewer coping skills may be associated with higher levels of psychological distress under stressful events. For people who attempt suicide or who have suicidal ideation, studies have found that these individuals seem to have less developed coping strategies or use these coping skills less frequently (Botsis, Soldators, Liossi, Kokkevi, & Stefanis, 1994; Kaslow et al., 2002; Kralik & Danforth, 1992). Although adaptive coping may facilitate finding solutions in resolving challenges, maladaptive coping may worsen the situation. Because of a lack of more adaptive coping skills, some individuals who attempt suicide may use suicide as a means of coping with highly stressful situations. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) conceptualized coping into two categories: emotion-focused coping, which focuses on releasing and reducing the emotional distress coming from the stressor, and problem-focused coping, which directs attention to ways of resolving the situation. In addition to these two types of coping, Endler and Parker (1994) added avoidance-oriented coping, in which an individual uses strategies that temporarily distract him or her from the stressful situation. An early meta-analysis study (Suls & Fletcher, 1985) indicated that emotion-focused coping is associated with more negative psychological outcomes than are problem-focused coping and avoidance-oriented coping. The literature on suicide seems to agree with this finding in that emotion-oriented coping may be associated with a higher level of suicidal behavior (Edwards & Holden, 2001; Puskar, Hoover, & Miewald, 1992). A recent path study (Wang, Lightsey, Pietruszka, Uruk, & Wells, 2007) found that the more stressful events occur in life, the more likely individuals are to use emotion-focused coping. Emotion-oriented coping seemed to increase suicidal behavior by increasing levels of depression and reducing an individual's reasons for living. Wang et al. (2007) also reported that avoidance-oriented coping reduced suicidal risk by increasing reasons for living. …