Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Apr 9, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 9, 2018 - Apr 29, 2018
Date Accepted: Apr 29, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Reducing Suicidal Ideation and Deliberate Self-Harm: Systematic Review
Background:
Since its emergence in the 1980s, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has become a reputable evidence-based psychological therapy for certain disorders. Trials examining the efficacy of ACT are spread across a broad spectrum of presentations, such as chronic pain, anxiety, and depression. Nevertheless, ACT has very rarely been trialed as an intervention for suicidal ideation (SI) or deliberate self-harm (DSH).
Objective:
The objective of this review is to assess the efficacy of ACT in reducing SI and DSH and to examine the suitability of reported SI, DSH, and other measures in determining the efficacy of ACT.
Methods:
We systematically reviewed studies on ACT as intervention for SI and self-harm. Electronic databases, including MEDLINE, PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, SCOPUS, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, were searched. The reference lists of included studies and relevant systematic reviews were examined to identify additional publications. Search terms were identified with reference to the terminology used in previous review papers on ACT and suicide prevention. The study design was not restricted to randomized controlled trials. Screening was completed by 2 reviewers, and all duplicates were removed. Publications were excluded if they were not published in English, were multicomponent therapy or were not based on ACT, or lacked a validated measure or structured reporting of SI/DSH outcomes.
Results:
After removing the duplicates, 554 articles were screened for relevance. Following the screening, 5 studies that used ACT as an intervention for suicidal or self-harming individuals were identified. The studies used diverse methodologies and included 2 case studies, 2 pre–post studies, and 1 mHealth randomized controlled trial.
Conclusions:
The review found that ACT is effective in reducing SI in the 2 pre–post studies but not in other studies. However, given the small number and lack of methodological rigor of the studies included in this review, insufficient evidence exists for the recommendation of ACT as an intervention for SI or DSH.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.