Emergency First Responders’ Misconceptions about Suicide: A Descriptive Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Line 45, "Nowadays (since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 20th century),..." I think this sentence can be cut to improve the clarity of the paragraph.

Lines 105-107 Talking about the drafting of the myths and confirming what describes the recognition of a myth versus whether the participant believes the statement is a fact, is a little unclear and confusing.  This description needs better clarification.

I think the overall inclusion of Figures 1-3 is really important and the distinction of different professionals' identification of suicide myths is compelling. However, I think each figure needs a bit more clarification than the brief description provided in the manuscript.

Overall, I think this paper provides a much-needed analysis and is really compelling.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Overall, the manuscript is very interesting. Some of the wording is a little confusing and the methods could be improved for clarification.  Some of the sentence structure is a little long, making the overall manuscript a bit cumbersome to read.  

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title, summary and introduction are correct. They collect the information necessary to understand and contextualize the work.

Methods

In the Participants section, I think it is necessary to better describe the inclusion criteria of the subjects, since the criterion 'professional category and position held' does not seem like a criterion but rather a characteristic to be evaluated. Furthermore, I encourage that the characteristics of the sample (sociodemographic variables) be included in the results section.

Regarding the instrument used, I see that its validation has not been carried out. It has been developed taking into account the opinion of several experts, obtaining a CVI for each item, but an analysis of reliability and validity has not been done. I think this is a weak point of the work because, by not having a correctly validated tool, the results may be biased. I encourage you to validate the tool with these same data and confirm its psychometric characteristics.

In relation to ethical considerations, I understand that you rely on the section you discuss about the APA guidelines, but it is advisable to obtain ethical permission to carry out any work.

Regarding the results, I recommend that both percentage and frequency data be collected in Table 3.

Lines 141-142 are interpretations of the results that should be included in the discussion.

After reading the results, I think it would be interesting to classify the different myths into categories since they can provide profiles on which to work based on the characteristics of the subjects surveyed.

Regarding the comparison between the groups surveyed, I do not see any type of analysis that indicates whether there were significant differences between the answers provided by the different groups. Why? I see only a basic analysis exposing the myths prevalent in each group, but it is interesting to know the differences and if they are real. Moreover, a correlation analysis with sociodemographic variables would be really interesting. I encourage you to do these anaylisis and include them.

In the discussion section, perhaps it would be good to collect some more references that support the results, especially in the interpretation of the most prevalent myth, and go a little deeper into the analysis in general. In addition, it would include the limitations in this section. And as you say in the limitations section, it would be good to carry out more statistical analysis and I believe that this work is the place to present them because otherwise, this work remains at a very superficial level of analysis.

As for the conclusions, I think they should be summarized and not be such an obvious summary of the results.

Finally, a high number of references are more than 5 years old, it would be necessary to conduct a review of the most current literature to support their results.

Line 344, incomplete start.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

They have made a large part of the requested changes, substantially improving the quality of the work.

However, I consider that the methodology section should include a data analysis section in which to explain the analyzes carried out. I believe that the lack of validation of the scale applied is a weak point of the work and I consider that a prior validation study should be carried out.

Furthermore, in the results section a comparison section between groups has been added, but a statistical analysis is not carried out to support this comparison or, at least, it is not presented. A description and interpretation is made, but I think it would be more appropriate to provide an objective analysis.

As for the discussion, it has improved substantially as have the conclusions.

In table 4 you must indicate what the data presented are (frequency and percentage) so that it is complete.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf