The association between victimization experiences and suicidality: The mediating roles of sleep and depression

Prior work suggests that multiple forms of victimization were associated with higher suicide risk among adolescents. However, the mechanisms underlying this association remain unclear. The present study aimed to understand the relationships between the multiple forms of victimization and suicidality by examining the potential mediators of sleep duration and depression.

Data for this study came from the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). The hypothesized mediation model included 13,677 American adolescents in 9th through 12th-grade students (48.6 % female) were analyzed using Mplus 7.4, and suicidality (including suicidal ideation, plan, and attempts) as the outcome variables and the multiple forms of victimization (including bullying at school, being threatened at school, electronic bullying, sexual victimization, sexual dating victimization, and physical dating victimization) as the main explanatory variable.

The relationships between the multiple forms of victimization and suicide risk were mediated by sleep duration, depression, and also serially mediated by sleep duration and depression.

This is a cross-sectional study, and the results cannot inform the causality between these variables. This investigation only included adolescent sleep duration, and other specific sleep problem indicators should be included.

Longer sleep duration is an important protective factor, pointing the way forward for developing suicide prevention strategies and targeted interventions for adolescents.