Category: Suicide

People are least happy and at the highest risk of suicide during these years.

Middle-aged people are at the highest risk of suicide, research shows.

The risk is particularly high among middle-aged women.

Middle-aged people — those in their 40s and 50s — are at twice the risk of suicide as those in their 30s or 60s.

The results tie in with surveys of happiness which find that people are at their lowest point, on average, as they approach their 50s.

Professor Andrew Oswald, the study’s first author, said:

“Suicide among the middle-aged, in the richest and safest societies ever known in human history, is a major paradox and public-policy concern.

Not only does it matter in itself — it is also a marker of a wider phenomenon of midlife distress.

What is it that is going wrong in people’s lives around the late 40s, when individuals tend to be prosperous, still healthy, and at the height of their powers?”

The study’s authors refer to Dr Elliott Jaques, the psychoanalyst who first proposed the ‘midlife crisis’:

“Jaques argued that at midlife the typical person starts to foresee death and to evaluate the meaning of their own life.

For half a century, the idea met skepticism, and sometimes derision, from scientists.

In public discussion, however, the idea gained ground…”

The reason for the increase in suicide risk in midlife is unknown, but the study’s authors speculate:

“It may be linked to thwarted life aspirations, and there must presumably be some kind of connection with health.

It cannot be blamed on young children in the home or on marital breakdown or on midlife unemployment; controlling for these, statistically, makes little difference.”

Other researchers make an economic argument.

Professor Angus Deaton, who has authored a study on a midlife dip in life satisfaction, says it could be down to too much work:

“This is the period at which wage rates typically peak and is the best time to work and earn the most, even at the expense of present well-being, so as to have increased wealth and well-being later in life.”

The study was published as IZA Discussion Paper No. 10759 (Oswald & Tohamy, 2017).

One in five suicides around the world is caused by this and the figure is rising.

Unemployment is linked to 45,000 suicides around the world each year, a new study finds.

This represents around one in five of the total number of global suicides.

The research, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, gathered data from 63 countries between 2000 and 2011 (Nordt et al., 2015).

They found that the risk of suicide due to unemployment had risen between 20 and 30 per cent across all regions of the world.

Also, since the period included the start of the recession in 2008, they were able to look at its effect.

Dr. Carlos Nordt, who led the study, said:

“After the crisis year in 2008, the number of suicides increased short-term by 5,000 cases.

Therefore, suicides associated with unemployment totaled a nine-fold higher number of deaths than excess suicides attributed to the most recent economic crisis.”

It’s not just the unemployment itself that is linked to suicide, it’s the period leading up to it when employees can face an uncertain and stressful few months, or even longer.

Suicide and unemployment

In some countries the impact of unemployment is worse, as the team explains:

“…our data suggest that not all job losses necessarily have an equal impact, as the effect on suicide risk appears to be stronger in countries where being out of work is uncommon.

It is possible that an unexpected increase in the unemployment rate may trigger greater fears and insecurity than in countries with higher pre-crisis unemployment levels.”

Dr Wolfram Kawohl, one of the study’s authors, said:

“The development on the job market was obviously anticipated and the uncertainty regarding the development of the economic situation already seems to have negative consequences.

Training for specialists such as those in the human resources department is needed to recognize this increased suicide risk in people both in and out of work more effectively and to help deal with the problem.”

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Suicidal thoughts can fluctuate rapidly.

Most people who die by suicide do not tell doctors they have suicidal thoughts in the weeks before their death, research finds.

The finding upends the common belief that asking about suicidal thoughts is a useful way of assessing the risk of suicide.

The study found that 60 percent of people under psychiatric care who later took their own lives told a psychiatrist they did not have suicidal thoughts.

Suicidal people may hide their thoughts out of shame or perhaps the fear of being stopped.

Suicide is a relatively rare event, though, said Professor Matthew Large, study co-author:

“We know that suicide ideas are pretty common and that suicide is actually a rare event, even among people with severe mental illness.

But what we didn’t know was how frequently people who go on to suicide have denied having suicidal thoughts when asked directly.”

The new research is a meta-analysis, a way of bringing together the results of many other studies — in this case 70.

The results showed that just 1.7 percent of people with suicidal ideas went on to take their own lives.

Among people who were not under psychiatric care, 80 percent of people who ended their own life denied having suicidal thoughts to a physician.

Dr Catherine McHugh, the study’s first author, said:

“Doctors sometimes rely on what is known as suicidal ideation—being preoccupied with thoughts and planning suicide—as a crucial test for short-term suicide risk, and it has been argued it could form part of a screening test for suicide.

Our results show that this is not in the best interests of patients.”

Dr McHugh says suicidal thoughts can fluctuate rapidly:

“Some people will try to hide their suicidal feelings from their doctor, either out of shame or because they don’t want to be stopped.

We also know that suicidal feelings can fluctuate rapidly, and people may suicide very impulsively after only a short period of suicidal thoughts.”

Instead of relying on suicidal ideation, clinicians should focus on distress, said Professor Large:

“It means trying to better understand the patient’s distress and not making patients wait weeks for treatment or denying treatment in the absence of suicidal thoughts.”

The study was published in the journal BJPsych Open (McHugh et al., 2019).

Study of suicidal brains suggests that neuroinflammation could play an important role in suicidal thoughts and behaviour.

People experiencing suicidal thoughts have a certain type of inflammation in their brain, research finds.

Microglial cells activate as part of the body’s inflammatory response.

The researchers found that these immune cells were more active in depressed people who were also having suicidal thoughts.

The study suggests that neuroinflammation could play an important role in suicidal thoughts and behaviour.

It may also offer another route to treat this type of depression: through the use of drugs to reduce inflammation.

Dr Peter Talbot, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings are the first results in living depressed patients to suggest that this microglial activation is most prominent in those with suicidal thinking.”

Suicidal brain study

The study involved 14 patients experiencing moderate to severe depression.

The researchers found that activation of the microglial cells was particularly strong in the anterior cingulate cortex.

This part of the brain is known to be involved in mood regulation and depression.

Dr Talbot said:

“The field now has two independent reports — our study and a 2015 report by Setiawan and colleagues in Toronto — showing essentially the same thing: that there is evidence for inflammation, more specifically microglial activation, in the brains of living patients during a major depressive episode.”

Professor John Krystal, the Editor of the journal Biological Psychiatry, said:

“This paper is an important addition to the view that inflammation is a feature of the neurobiology of a subgroup of depressed patients, in this case the group with suicidal ideation.

This observation is particularly important in light of recent evidence supporting a personalized medicine approach to depression, i.e., that anti-inflammatory drugs may have antidepressant effects that are limited to patients with demonstrable inflammation.”

The study was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry (Holmes et al., 2017).