Despite the growth of research on suicide, very few studies, to our awareness, have focused on suicide in men of middle and old age. It is imperative to increase our understanding and to unravel the explanatory mechanisms of the high suicide rate in this specific segment of population.
Suicide is a multifactorial phenomenon; often an interplaying result from biological, psychological, and social/environmental risk vulnerabilities and triggers. There is ample evidence of systematic inequalities in suicide risk associated with different indicators of social position, including labour market status, occupational social class, education, income and marital status, and with mental and physical illnesses at the individual level.
We need research to systematically examine whether these systematic inequalities in suicide risk are more prominent in men of middle and old age, and to seek answer to the grave disparity in the high number of men who die from suicide and the low number of men who seek treatment for depression and other mental health challenges.
Main projects on this topic
Unravelling suicide risk in men of middle and old age: searching evidence from longitudinal population register
The over-arching purpose of this project is to enhance our understanding of suicide in men during middle age and old adulthood as an important health and social concern, and to unravel the underlying mechanisms contributing to the link between stress and frustrations and risk for suicide in this population.
We will apply the Diathesis-Stress theory model to investigate the contextual influence of a large range of factors with a rich source of data from longitudinal population registries in Norway.
Participants
• Ping Qin
• Lars Mehlum
• Erik Oftedahl Næss
• Carla Louise Hughes
Publications
Qin P., Syeda S., Canetto SS., Arya V., Liu BP., Menon V., Lew B., Platt S., Yip PS., Gunnell D (2022). Midlife suicide: A systematic review and meta-analysis of socioeconomic, psychiatric and physical health risk factors. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 154:233-241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2022.07.037.
Næss, E. O., Mehlum, L., Qin, P. (2021). Marital status and suicide risk: Temporal effect of marital breakdown and contextual difference by socioeconomic status. SSM - Population Health, 15, 100853. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100853.