A comparison of major depressive and obsessive- compulsive subjects with current suicidal ideations in terms of socio-demographic, clinic, and personality factors.

Background. In the present study, we tried to examine the importance of current suicidal thoughts in OCD by comparing the patients with OCD and Major Depression (MD) in terms of several socio-demographic and clinical variables.Methods: The sample included 31 MD, and 36 OCD patients. SCID-I and SCID-II were used to evaluate the diagnoses of the patients according to DSM-IV. The severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OC) were measured through Y-BOCS. Beck Depression Inventory and Beck Anxiety Scale were used to assess the severity of depression and anxiety. The severity of current suicidal ideations was evaluated by The Scale for Suicidal Ideation. In addition, Beck Hopelessness Scale were used to measure the level of hopelessness.Results: The mean number of Axis I Disorders were significantly higher in patients with MD compared to OCD patients. The total, obsession and compulsion subscale scores of Y-BOCS were more likely to be higher in OCD patients than in patients with MD. There was a negative correlation between The Scale for Suicidal Ideation and age. We have found a positive correlation between the severity of current suicidal ideation and the scores of BeckAnxiety Scale. The religious obsessions (p<0.0001), and the mean number of compulsions were significantly higher in OCD group compared to MD group. Lineer Regression Analyses indicated that age, and the severity of depression strongly predicted the occurence of current suicidal ideations.Limitations: The relatively smaller sample size is an important limitation of this cross-sectional study. Further longitudinal studies are required to assess the other risk factors in OCD.Conclusion: For the total sample, we have found a positive correlation between the severity of current suicidal ideations and the the severity of depression, and the mean number of previous suicidal acts. The findings of this study indicate that depression might be associated with the occurence of suicidal ideation in OCD patients.