The Personal Suicide Stigma Questionnaire (PSSQ): Relation to Self-Esteem, Well-Being, and Help-Seeking
, John O’Gorman 1 and Jurgita Rimkeviciene 2,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Researcher,
Mortality rates by suicide are increasing worldwide. The PSSQ is assessed from the perspective of individuals experiencing the stigma of suicide, not the general public.
This study is very meaningful in that it pays attention to the internal perspective of individuals who have experienced a suicide and derives data results from the perspective of individuals who have experienced suicide.
However, this study can be recognized as a preliminary sample study considering the opinion that an additional review of the future group will be conducted despite problems such as small sample size, limitations of a measurement method, and lack of previous studies.
Finally, the Discussion section suggests adding more previous research and findings to defend the findings and opinions of this study.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We greatly appreciate the feedback from reviewers on our paper “The Personal Suicide Stigma Questionnaire (PSSQ): Relation to Self-Esteem, Well-Being, and Help-Seeking” and your continued consideration of it for publication in IJERPH.We have revised the manuscript in the light of the comments and indicate below how this has been done. There were comments from Reviewers, which we include below, and the changes we made in response to them are outlined following each comment. Please note that the page numbers and line numbers referred to in our responses to reviewer comments are as displayed in the clean view without track changes.
Reviewer 1:
Mortality rates by suicide are increasing worldwide. The PSSQ is assessed from the perspective of individuals experiencing the stigma of suicide, not the general public.
This study is very meaningful in that it pays attention to the internal perspective of individuals who have experienced a suicide and derives data results from the perspective of individuals who have experienced suicide.
However, this study can be recognized as a preliminary sample study considering the opinion that an additional review of the future group will be conducted despite problems such as small sample size, limitations of a measurement method, and lack of previous studies.
We appreciate the kind words from the Reviewer about the purpose of the study. We also agree with the limitations of the study mentioned, agreeing that the findings are preliminary, and, as we put in the limitations section: “Whether the results generalise to other populations, such as patients presenting to hospital emergency departments following a suicide attempt or patients seeking treatment for suicidal behaviour awaits further examination.”
Finally, the Discussion section suggests adding more previous research and findings to defend the findings and opinions of this study.
We thank Reviewer for the observation. We now included the references to the prior findings on the PSSQ scale in the Discussion section. We also included the newest findings published in IJERPH from a qualitative study about the help-seeking process in young adults for suicidality (see lines 486-490 of the amended manuscript, clean version).
We hope these changes meet the expectations of the Reviewer.
Sincerely,
Authors
Reviewer 2 Report
The topic is interesting and the paper is generally well written.
Some layout adjustments are needed (the size, the content and the line in rows/columns of the table should be formatted properly and on page6-7 there are some issues in the heading of the table).
There is some room for improvement in the related work section. Please refer to other SOTA approaches on the topic of suicidal detection.
For example include "A Comparative Analysis on Suicidal Ideation Detection Using NLP, Machine, and Deep Learning", 2022 and for a comprehensive and novel report on modern deep models please refer to: "Fake News Spreaders Detection: Sometimes Attention Is Not All You Need", 2022.
Finally for a more generic review on ML methods refer to: "Suicidal ideation detection: A review of machine learning methods and applications", 2020.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We greatly appreciate the feedback from reviewers on our paper “The Personal Suicide Stigma Questionnaire (PSSQ): Relation to Self-Esteem, Well-Being, and Help-Seeking” and your continued consideration of it for publication in IJERPH.We have revised the manuscript in the light of the comments and indicate below how this has been done. There were comments from Reviewers, which we include below, and the changes we made in response to them are outlined following each comment.
Reviewer 2:
The topic is interesting and the paper is generally well written.
Some layout adjustments are needed (the size, the content and the line in rows/columns of the table should be formatted properly and on page6-7 there are some issues in the heading of the table).
We have now amended the formatting of the Tables and their headings.
There is some room for improvement in the related work section. Please refer to other SOTA approaches on the topic of suicidal detection.
For example include "A Comparative Analysis on Suicidal Ideation Detection Using NLP, Machine, and Deep Learning", 2022 and for a comprehensive and novel report on modern deep models please refer to: "Fake News Spreaders Detection: Sometimes Attention Is Not All You Need", 2022.
Finally for a more generic review on ML methods refer to: "Suicidal ideation detection: A review of machine learning methods and applications", 2020.
We thank the reviewer for the suggestions. However, Reviewer 2 seems to have mistaken our purpose. It is not the prediction of suicidal ideation or behaviour, for which predictive analytics using machine learning approaches may well be effective, but the understanding of “the internal perspective of individuals who have experienced a suicide” as Reviewer 1 so aptly puts it.” We have not therefore attempted to include the references Reviewer 2 has helpfully provided.
Sincerely,
Authors
