Relationship between Suicidal Ideation, Automatic Thoughts and Stress among Post Graduate Students

Suicidal ideation is concerned mainly with the obsessed thoughts to commit suicide. The range of the suicide depends upon the thought process including fleeting to extensive thoughts and role playing. The term automatic thought is defined as a thought that also comes in as an image in the mind seemingly automatically in response to an event, for example an event can be “a car is coming towards you”, an automatic thought can be “I am in danger!” and feeling associated is “fear, anxiety”. The thoughts that are immediate, quick that goes in the mind as a response to a situation. They are the thinking reactions that affect emotions and behaviors. Stress can be defined as a situation when one feels overloaded with pressures and if in reality that pressure can be handled or not. The aim of the current investigation is to study the relationship between suicidal ideation, automatic thoughts and stress among college going students. For this study, Suicidal Ideation scale (Devendera Singh et al., 2005), Automatic thought questionnaire (Kendall and Hollon,, 1980) and Perceived stress scale (Woerner and Gardell, 1990) to be administered to the sample of 100 students in the age range of 20-24 years. The sample is to be taken from different Post Graduate colleges of Chandigarh. An inter-correlation matrix will be calculated to see the relationship between the variables. The result has shown positive and significant correlation between suicidal ideation and automatic thoughts (r = 0.52), significant at 0.01 level. The result has also shown positive and significant correlation between suicidal ideation and stress (r = 0.21), significant at 0.05 level.