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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
that is managed on a "nonindigenous" or Western European medical
model. The interviewers themselves had been well trained, and the
study participants were not aware that the interviewers were
physicians.
Although routine medications were unlikely to have influenced
participants' recall of their experiences, it may be that the effects of
the drugs they had ingested in overdose quantities could have clouded
their sensorium to the extent that they did not remember NDEs. Ring
(1980) discussed the fact that drugs may indeed hamper recall of NDEs.
A large proportion of our sample group of suicide attempters were
young persons. It is known that young people may have made
parasuicidal gestures to signal psychosocial distress rather than a
genuine attempt at self-harm (Anonymous, 2003; De Silva and
Seneviratne, 2003). However, even if these patients had not intended
to harm themselves seriously, the effects of their attempts had
necessitated them being admitted to the hospital and detained for
more than 24 hours. Only a few reported loss of consciousness, and we
wondered whether that fact had any bearing on our negative result.
Finally, since negative results are less likely to be published
(Rockwell, Kimler, and Moulder, 2006), we may not be aware of
previous studies that failed to find NDEs among suicide attempters.
Contrary to our expectation, suicide attempters did not report near-
death experiences in the present study. The facts that participants
were questioned in a hospital managed on a Western European
medical model, that few had loss of consciousness, and that their
recollections may have been clouded by medications on which they had
overdosed, acting singly or in combination, may have influenced these
unexpected results. Further research into NDEs among suicide
attempters should include a measure of suicidal intent.
References
Anonymous. (2003). Suicide prevention strategies in Sri Lanka: The role of sociocultural
factors and health services. Ceylon Medical Journal, 48, 68-69.
De Silva, D., and Seneviratne, R. de A. (2003). Deliberate self harm at the National
Hospital Sri Lanka (NHSL): Significance of psychosocial factors and psychiatric
morbidity. Journal of the Ceylon College of Physicians, 36, 39-42.
Greyson, B. (1983). The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, reliability and
validity. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 171, 369-375.
Greyson, B. (1991). Near-death experiences precipitated by suicide attempt: Lack of
influence of psychopathology, religion and expectations. Journal of Near-Death
Studies, 6, 183-188.
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