United States: A recent study by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), has revealed that female patients with a history of suicidality have an increased risk of suicidal ideation or suicidal planning in the days surrounding menstruation.
This is the first longitudinal study to examine how these symptoms fluctuate over the menstrual cycle. The findings provide new guidelines for clinicians regarding when to target interventions with suicidal patients.
“As clinicians, we feel responsible for keeping our patients safe from a suicide attempt, but we often don’t have much information about when we need to be most concerned about their safety,” Ms. Tory Eisenlohr-Moul, associate professor of psychiatry at UIC and senior author of the paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, remarked.
“This study establishes that the menstrual cycle can affect many people who have suicidal thoughts, which makes it one of the only predictable recurring risk factors that has been identified for detecting when a suicide attempt might occur,” Ms. Eisenlohr-Moul added.
Ms. Jordan Barone, an MD/PhD student, and postdoctoral researcher Ms. Jackie Ross co-led the American Journal of Psychiatry study, which tracked 119 patients who answered a daily survey to monitor suicidal thoughts and other mental health symptoms for at least one menstrual cycle. The design made it possible for the researchers to gather comprehensive information about how patients’ mental health changed throughout their cycle.
In the premenstrual and early menstrual phases, the majority of study participants reported significantly elevated levels of psychiatric symptoms like depression, anxiety, and hopelessness; other patients reported emotional changes at different stages of their cycle. The particular mental symptoms that accompanied suicidal thoughts also differed among individuals.
According to Ms. Eisenlohr-Moul, “people varied in which emotional symptoms were most correlated with suicidality for them.”
“Just because the cycle makes somebody irritable or have mood swings or feel anxious, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s going to have the same effect on creating suicidality for each person,” Ms. Eisenlohr-Moul commended.
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