Iranian depressed patients attempting suicide showed impaired memory and problem-solving

Background – It has been longly well-known that depressed patients attempting suicide tend to retrieve overgeneral autobiographical memories and create less effective problem-solving strategies with a considerable slowness. Methods – Two cognitive measures, autobiographical memory test and means-ends problem-solving task, Persian versions, were used to assess 20 parasuicide patients who met diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders criteria for major depression disorder (MDD), and were compared with a matched control group. The healthy subjects also met the criteria for subjects recruitment (no psychopathological background). Beck depression inventory (BDI) and Beck hopelessness scale (BHS) were performed to assess, respectively depression and hopelessness. Results – It was found that the suicide attempters were more depressed and more hopeless than the matched healthy subjects. The results showed that the parasuicides produced more overgeneral memories and responded more slowly to positive than negative cue-word, compared to the control subjects. In the problem-solving task, the patients provided less effective strategies, fewer means, and more irrelevant means; also they took longer to respond to the matched healthy subjects. Moreover, there were significant correlations between autobiographical memory and problem-solving variables.Conclusion – There were significant correlations between autobiographical memory and problem-solving variables. Clinical implications will be discussed.