Mediating Role of Depression between Emotion Regulation Strategies and Suicide Proneness among Male Patients with Substance Use Disorder

This paper was set out to explore the mediating factor of depression in the interrelationship between emotional regulation (i.e. affective suppression and cognitive reappraisal) and suicide-proneness among males with Substance Use Disorder (SUD). It used a cross-sectional quantitative design and recruited 180 male participants who were recruited through a purposive sampling technique in Karachi in rehabilitation centres that are located in urban areas. The tools that were used to obtain the data include the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), the Siddiqui Shah Depression Scale (SSDS), and the Life Attitude Schedule Short Form (LAS-SF), which are standardised tools. It was analysed with the help of mediation analyses with the help of the PROCESS Macro (Model 4), Pearson correlations, and descriptive statistics. Findings indicated that affective suppression positively correlated with depression and suicide proneness, but no positive correlation was found between cognitive reappraisal and depression and suicide proneness. Mediation analysis showed that depression mediated the correlation between both the affective suppression and suicide proneness, and the cognitive reappraisal and suicide proneness. The research concludes that depression is a very important psychological process connecting emotion regulation and suicidal risk. These results support the importance of culturally specific cognitive-behavioural and emotion-focused interventions in enhancing the process o