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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
KEY WORDS: near-death experience; suicide attempt; Sri Lanka. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported to have occurred under a variety of different circumstances, including attempted suicide. However, there have been relatively few published studies among this particular group, when compared with serious medical or surgical problems. David Rosen (1975) interviewed seven people who had survived the jump from the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges, all of whom reported near-death experiences. Kenneth Ring and Stephen Franklin (1981) interviewed 36 suicide attempters in the community and noted that 47 percent had NDEs. Bruce Greyson (1991) studied 61 patients who had attempted suicide in a hospital setting and noted that 26 percent had NDEs. The present study was an attempt to explore the phenomenon further in a larger study population. Methods Patients We included patients who had attempted suicide and required inpatient admission for more than 24 hours in Ragama Hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which is a tertiary teaching hospital. We interviewed participants at least 24 hours after hospital admission in order to limit the sample to patients who attempted suicide with serious sequelae. The patients had to be in the hospital at the time of the interview and they had to speak fluent Sinhalese. We excluded patients who had any past or current history of major psychotic condition with thought disorder or related hallucinatory phenomena. We performed the study over an 8-month period. We obtained written informed consent from all patients and approval from the local ethics committee. Questionnaire We translated Bruce Greyson's (1983) NDE Scale into Sinhalese to assess the prevalence of NDEs among the patient population. We modified the scale by adding a third positive response option to the choice of answers to account for any variations in education levels in a
Quarterly journal publishing papers related to near-death experiences, including research reports; theoretical or conceptual statements; expressions of a scientific, philosophic, religious, or historical perspective on the study of near-death experiences; cross-cultural studies; individual case histories; and personal accounts of experiences or related phenomena.
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Kuruppuarchchi, K. A. L. A.; Gambheera, Harischandra; Padmasekara, Gayan & Perera, Mahendra.Near-Death Experiences in Suicide Attempters in Sri Lanka,
article,
Summer 2008;
Lawrence, Kansas.
(https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc798946/m1/2/:
accessed July 17, 2024),
University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu;
.