Are Specific Personality Traits Associated with Suicide Behaviour?
Four main constellations of personality characteristics are associated with suicidal behaviour: impulsivity, hostility–aggression, introversion, and anxiety-neuroticism. A rich body of data details the association between suicide attempts and impulsivity. Impulsivity has been shown to be a risk factor for suicidal behaviour in a variety of adults [7, 8, 28–30] and adolescents [11, 31, 32] with psychiatric illness, in a forensic psychiatric population [33], and in the general population [34]. Freud regarded suicide as an aggressive act, a view borne out to some extent by modern data. Simon et al. [35] found that involvement in physical fights was associated with violent suicide attempts, and, according to Appleby et al. [36], people who committed suicide were more likely to have been arrested in the previous six months. Cavanagh et al. [37] confirmed that a criminal record is a risk factor for subsequent suicide. Fulwiler et al. [38] detected a higher rate of suicide attempts in a group
