The relationship of spiritual understanding and self-esteem with suicidal thoughts

Introduction: Spirituality, as with the knowledge of the whole universe, is a force beyond the material aspects of life. Self-esteem is generally a component of evaluation of self-concept and the suicidal thoughts is a condition that implies on the occurrence of any self-destructing thoughts. Materials and methods: Methodology of the present study was descriptive and correlational. The study population included all graduate students of Azad University of Ilam from which 235 persons (138 men and 97 women) were selected through stratified random sampling. The measuring tools of data were as follow: Kings spiritual understanding questionnaire, Eysenck self-esteem questionnaire and Beck suicidal ideation scale. The data was analyzed with using the statistical software SPSS the statistical methods, Pearson correlation coefficient, analysis of variance, multiple regression analysis and structural equations. Results: Spiritual understanding and self-esteem reversely and significantly predicted the thoughts of suicide with the coefficients -0.194 and -0.077, respectively. Conclusion: Individual factors such as spiritual perception and self-esteem are important and effective on the mental aspects of students. By increasing the impact of these factors, it could be expected to reduce the number of suicides.