Body as Expression of Psychiatric Distress: Insights from Restrictive Eating Disorders, Non-Suicidal Self Injuries, and Suicide Attempts

Introduction This database includes the raw data linked with the paper “Body as Expression of Psychiatric Distress: Insights from Restrictive Eating Disorders, Non-Suicidal Self Injuries, and Suicide Attempts” in submission to Frontiers in Psychology. In this paper, we reported sociodemographic characteristics, psychopathological assessment, R-PAS performances and level of functioning. We aimed to describe three groups of patients using a multimethod assessment and characterize the core of their diseases, highlighting similarities and differences. The three groups of adolescent patients are patients who suffer from restrictive eating disorders (REDs), present non-suicidal self-injuries (NSSIs), or have a previous history of suicidal attempts (SA). Methods Sixty adolescents were recruited and divided into three groups: 20 patients suffering from REDs, 20 showing NSSI behaviors, and 20 with a previous history of suicidal attempts. We collected data from the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (K-SADS-PL-DSM-5), the SCID-5-Personality Disorders, the Children Global Assessment Scale (CGAS), the Clinical Global Impression – Severity (CGI-S), the WISC-IV or WAIS-IV, and the Rorschach test according to the R-PAS method. Results Depressive symptoms were more severe in the SA group than in the others. The SA group exhibited higher levels of dysregulation symptoms, social anxiety, and GAD compared to the RED group. The RED group displayed a higher prevalence of OCD symptoms than the NSSI group, which showed the lowest levels. The SCID-5-PD revealed a significantly higher presence of borderline personality traits in the NSSI group compared to the RED group. The RED group demonstrated substantially better functioning than the SA group. Finally, regarding R-PAS performance, the NSSI group displayed the lowest Pull (Pu) scores compared to the RED and SA groups. They also exhibited higher Vague (Vg%) scores than the SA group. In contrast, the RED group scored lower in the Sum of the blend of achromatic/light-dark and color determinants (CBlend) and Critical Contents (CritCont%) than the NSSI group. Furthermore, the RED group had significantly higher scores in the Proportion of not pure H responses (NPH/SumH) than the NSSI group.