2025/06/27 by Massimo Stella, Trevor Swanson, Andreia Sofia Teixeira +5 · 1 voice
Psychology · #Mental Health via Writing #Suicide and Self-Harm Studies #Mental Health Research Topics
paper · pdf · doi:10.3390/bdcc9070171
openalex publication_date 2025/06/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Understanding the mindset of people who die by suicide remains a key research challenge. We map conceptual and emotional word–word co-occurrences in 139 genuine suicide notes and in reference word lists, an Emotional Recall Task, from 200 individuals grouped by high/low depression, anxiety, and stress levels on DASS-21. Positive words cover most of the suicide notes’ vocabulary; however, co-occurrences in suicide notes overlap mostly with those produced by individuals with low anxiety (Jaccard index of 0.42 for valence and 0.38 for arousal). We introduce a “words not said” method: It removes every word that corpus A shares with a comparison corpus B and then checks the emotions of “residual” words in A−B. With no leftover emotions, A and B are similar in expressing the same emotions. Simulations indicate this method can classify high/low levels of depression, anxiety and stress with 80% accuracy in a balanced task. After subtracting suicide note words, only the high-anxiety corpus displays no significant residual emotions. Our findings thus pin anxiety as a key latent feature of suicidal psychology and offer an interpretable language-based marker for suicide risk detection.