‘Make Peace with Pain’: How Chronic Pain Patients Can Reduce Suicidal Thoughts

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

Suicide is an important but difficult subject in the pain community, as many people with poorly controlled pain contemplate ways to end it. In a PNN survey of nearly 6,000 pain patients, nearly half said they considered suicide because their pain was poorly treated.

“Without my opioid medicines I will be completely bedridden in never ending agony,” one patient said. “I fear I will be forced into suicide like so many before me because living in never ending unrelieved pain is not a life worth living.”

“I have been severely tapered to a very inadequate level of pain medication and am in so much pain that I am essentially in bed 24/7. I no longer have a life. It is merely an existence and I completely understand why chronic pain patients commit suicide,” said another.

“I was raised to believe suicide was a sin, but I can't say for sure how I'll feel about suicide in a few years if this pain I'm in continues to worsen,” another patient wrote.

Fortunately, most pain sufferers don’t act on those suicidal thoughts, but some lose hope and sink into despair. According to a 2018 estimate, about a quarter of all opioid overdoses are suicides or suicide attempts.

How can pain sufferers avoid suicide ideation? A recent study published in Pain Medicine suggests that pain acceptance – “making peace with pain” – can help reduce suicide risk.

“We know for a fact that when people are in pain — and a lot of pain in particular — it makes them think about killing themselves because they don’t want to be in pain forever,” says lead author Willie Hale, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Texas at San Antonio. “We know there’s a direct relationship here between these two things: The more pain you have, the more you’re going to have in terms of suicidal cognitions.”

Hale and his colleagues surveyed 207 patients with chronic pain, mostly active-duty military, veterans or family members. Respondents were asked about their pain severity, attitudes about suicide, and whether they thought they were a burden to others.

The study is based on the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide, which holds that suicidal thoughts or ideation often begin when individuals feel rejected by others and believe they are a burden. When combined with a reduced fear of death and a suicide “capability,” those thoughts can turn into suicidal behavior.

Hale says when people learn to accept their pain and make peace with it, feelings of burdensomeness and thoughts of suicide diminish. The pain won’t go away, but acceptance will help people push through the pain and participate in activities that make life enjoyable again. More meaningful activity results in more social connectivity -- helping to reduce feelings of rejection and burdensomeness.

“If you can move people from making no peace with their pain to just being a little bit okay with it, that cuts their suicide risk in half, and if you can get them to a high level of pain acceptance, it gets rid of it altogether,” said Hale. “Even if you can’t actually, functionally do anything to make their pain better, if you can just get them to make peace with it, they’re going to be less likely to kill themselves.”

Of course, pain acceptance will not improve access to opioid medication or prevent someone from being tapered to an ineffective dose. The best way to prevent suicide – not examined in this study – is to give patients appropriate pain relief.

“I attempted suicide as the only means of pain relief left available to me,” a person in pain told us. “Not because I was sad or depressed, but because I simply could not live another 10 minutes with no relief in sight.”