Nightmares may signal increased risk of suicide

Over the past five years Nadorff’s research has shown that nightmares are an important clue to suicide risk among healthy individuals—and that therapy aimed at addressing their nightmares could help save lives.

Scientists measure suicide risk by three elements: thoughts of suicide, suicidal behaviors and individuals’ own beliefs about the likelihood that they will die by suicide. In a 2011 study published in the journal Sleep, Nadorff and his colleagues evaluated suicide risk in 583 undergraduates and then examined how symptoms such as anxiety, depression and nightmares were related to that risk. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the more severe the symptoms, the higher the suicide risk. When they looked more closely, however, they found that having nightmares correlated with overall suicide risk more closely than any other factor.

“What amazed me was that not only are nightmares associated with suicide but the relation was maintained even after we controlled for depression, anxiety and PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” Nadorff says. “So here are some of the biggest risk factors in the field people think of or assess for, but nightmares are adding something that the others are not capturing.”