Validity and reliability study of the Turkish version of the tolerance for mental pain scale-10

OBJECTIVE: Psychological pain has been accepted as one of the most critical psychological risk factors underlying suicidal ideation and behaviour. Suicide is chosen as a way to get rid of intense, painful and unbearable psychological pain. Since the level of tolerance rather than the intensity of psychological pain was considered to be more predictive for suicide, we aimed to investigate the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of Tolerance for Mental Pain Scale-10 (TMPS-10). METHODS: A total of 121 patients diagnosed with depression in 62 of them had previous suicide attempts and 105 healthy controls who applied to the outpatient clinics of Cukurova University Faculty of Medicine Psychiatry Department were included in the study. Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSIS), Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), Psychache Scale (PS) and TMPS-10 were applied to participants. RESULTS: In the internal consistency analysis, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.96 for enduring the pain, 0.96 for managing the pain, 0.98 for the whole scale, and item-total correlation coefficients were found to be between 0.87 and 0.93. The scale fit well to both the two-factor and single-factor structure in the confirmatory factor analysis. The multi-group confirmatory factor analysis showed that both the depressive patients and the control group interpreted the scale items in the same way. In convergent validity analysis, there was a negative, linear, high and statistically significant relationship between TMPS-10 scores and PS, BSIS, BDI and BHS scores (r = -0.935; -0.779; -0.890; -0.808; p < .0.001, respectively). In discriminant function analysis, TMPS-10 successfully differentiated the depressive group and the control group, as well as the depressive patients who did or did not attempt suicide (96.5%, 88.1%, respectively). CONCLUSION: The Turkish version of TMPS-10 is valid and reliable, and may be useful in research and clinical practices about suicide.