Exploration of factors associated with social worker attitudes toward suicide

Background: Social workers are expected to play important roles in suicide intervention. Caregiving behaviours of medical personnel to suicidal individuals have been reported to be influenced by their own attitudes toward suicide. In this context, only a limited number of studies have examined social workers’ attitudes toward suicide. Aim: The purpose of this study was to explore associations between personal or occupational factors of social workers and their attitudes toward suicide. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was mailed to 2,999 study participants registered with the Tokyo chapter of the Japanese Association of Certified Social Workers. We adopted the Attitudes Toward Suicide Scale (ATTS) to measure attitudes toward suicide. MANCOVA was used to test for the effects of demographic, personal and occupational factors on ATTS sub-scale scores. Results: Participants with a history of suicidal thoughts had stronger attitudes regarding the right to suicide than those with no history; these attitudes were not affected by a history of participating in suicide-prevention training. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that suicide education should incorporate programmes directed at altering permissive attitudes toward suicide.