Comparison of Suicidal Ideations and Self-injurious Behaviors in Patients with Complicated and Non-complicated Type 2 Diabetes

Psychiatric problems like suicide, self-harm, and injurious behaviors are important and common in chronic diseases like diabetes. This study aimed to compare suicidal ideations and self-injurious behaviors in patients with type 2 diabetes with and without complications referring to diabetes research center in Yazd, 2017.

In this case-control study, simple random sampling was used. The data were collected using standard questionnaires. Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSSI) was used to investigate suicidal ideations and Sanson questionnaire was used for self- injurious behaviors. Finally, the collected data were entered into SPSS version 19. Also, t-test was used to compare the means and Chi-square test was used to compare the frequency distributions.

A total of 360 patients were studied in two groups of 180 (complicated and non-complicated). Of these patients, 189 (52.5%) were male and 171 (47.5%) were female. Moreover, only 1 patient (0.3%) had self-injurious thoughts and 1 patient (0.3%) had high suicidal ideations. There was no significant difference between the frequency distribution of self-injurious thoughts and suicidal ideations in the two groups (p=0.371). There was no significant difference between the frequency distribution of self-injurious thoughts and suicidal ideations in the two groups according to the gender (p=0.285, p=0.432).

The results showed that the frequency of self-injurious thoughts and suicidal ideations in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients is low and the complications of the disease do not affect this abundance.