Temperament and character traits among suicidal patients during depressive episode of bipolar disorder

Introduction Both suicide and mood disorders represent current and future global burden on public health system. Bipolar disorder (BD), part of a diagnostic group of mood disorders, is characterized by manic, depressive and mixed episodes with life-expectancy much shorter than in general population. Patients with BD have 30 times higher suicide rate than the general population and 25–50% of these patients attempts suicide. About 15% of patients who attempted suicide eventually end their lives with completed suicide. Aim The aim of our research was to distinguish personality features among bipolar patients with current depressive episode (BD-D) who attempted suicide. Materials and methods The research was conducted among patients with depressive episode of BD (according to diagnostic criteria of ICD–10) who attempted suicide and had been admitted for hospital psychiatric treatment. For assessment of personality, we used the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI, Cloninger R.) upon admittance. Our sample consisted of 31 ( n  = 31) patient who met the above mentioned criteria. All patients given their written informed consent. The statistical analysis was performed using SPSS 17.0. Results In our sample, we found, higher scores on harm-avoidance (HA), significantly higher scores on novelty seeking (NS) with significantly lower scores on persistence (P), self-directedness (SD) and cooperativeness (C) scales of the TCI. The Mann–Whitney-U test was used to compare samples. Conclusion In our sample, suicide attempts are associated with temperament and character dimensions. These results confirmed our initial hypotheses on existence of specific personality features among that group of suicidal patients with BD–D.