46 46 Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development Volume 42 Number 1 April 2009 46-63 © 2009 The Author(s) 10.1177/0748175609333562 http://mec.sagepub.com Differentiating Between Depression, Hopelessness, and Psychache in University Undergraduates Michelle M. DeLisle Ronald R. Holden Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada The overlap between depression, hopelessness, and psychache constructs was investigated using 587 undergraduates. Analyses indicated three correlated dimensions; among these, psychache accounts for more variance in depression and hopelessness than these latter vari- ables account for in psychache. All constructs demonstrated convergent validity, but psych- ache was associated with the widest range of suicide criteria. These findings support that psychache is a leading variable associated with suicide risk. Keywords: psychache; hopelessness; depression; suicidality ripe for developing more integrative models of suicidality. An important step toward this goal lies in understanding the degree of overlap or independence between the three key statistical suicide prediction models. Depression, Hopelessness, and Psychache Beck’s (1967) cognitive model is the broadest in scope, and it proposes that the primary causes of depression are one’s dys- functional beliefs about the self, the world, and the future—together constituting a depressive triad. Approximately two thirds of individuals, at the time of their first hospital- ization for attempting suicide, are diagnosed Authors’ Note: This research was supported in part by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Correspondence con- cerning this article should be addressed to Ronald R. Holden, Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada; e-mail: holdenr@ queensu.ca. S uicide is a major public health concern. In the United States, the suicide rate is 11 per 100,000 people, which translates to an average of 85 suicide deaths every day (Moscicki, 1999). The enormous scope of this issue can be further understood by con- sidering the potential impact of suicide attempts in general. For every suicide death, there are up to 10 times more suicide attempts that result in hospitalization (Holley, Fick, & Love, 1998) and between 50 to 100 times more suicide attempts that result in injuries not requiring inpatient admission (Pagliaro, 1995). To respond to calls for broad-based national suicide prevention strategies (Weir, 2001), it is imperative to first understand the key conditions associated with suicide risk. Suicidal behavior is complex and multiply determined; as such, suicide prevention pro- grams can address only potentially modifi- able risk factors (Brown, Beck, Steer, & Grisham, 2000). Research over the past 40 years has emphasized the role of psycho- logical variables in suicide risk, and of these, depression, hopelessness, and psychache have gained preeminence. The time is now Article by guest on February 16, 2016 mec.sagepub.com Downloaded from