Efficacy of psychological treatments for suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors in adolescents

Self-injurious and suicidal behaviors in adolescents are nowadays a public health problem that requires effective interventions. In order to elucidate the psychological treatments that, to date, work best to reduce or eliminate these behaviors, a review of meta-analysis and systematic reviews was carried out in the PsycArticles, PsycInfo and MEDLINE databases. The established eligibility criteria allowed the final selection of 10 records. The results showed high heterogeneity and poor results for the psychological treatments with small to moderate effect sizes for self-injurious behaviors, suicidal ideation, suicidality and especially for suicidal attempts. These effects tended to weaken or disappear in the medium to long term. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) proved to be comparatively the best performing of the interventions analyzed. The limited scope of the results and the important methodological limitations alert us to the need for further research and the future design of specific interventions for this type of problems.