Suicide and its risk factors - An ecological study

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Epidemiology
• Sociology

Background:

• Suicide prevalence and contributing factors exhibit significant global variation.
• Existing research indicates a need to identify socio-demographic and psychosocial risk factors for suicide.
• Global suicide data remains scarce, hindering comprehensive analysis and prevention efforts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify socio-demographic risk factors associated with suicide rates globally.
• To investigate the correlation between psychosocial stressors and suicide rates.
• To analyze population data from high and low suicide rate countries.

Main Methods:

• Utilized World Health Organization data to select top ten highest and lowest suicide rate countries.
• Conducted a systematic search of five global databases for socio-demographic and psychosocial data in August-September 2022.
• Analyzed correlations between suicide rates and various factors, setting statistical significance at P < 0.05.

Main Results:

• No statistically significant correlations were found between suicide rates and socio-demographic factors including age, gender, net enrollment rate, gender parity index, urban population percentage, marital status, and literacy rate.
• Similarly, no significant correlations were observed between suicide rates and psychosocial stressors such as unemployment, alcoholism, depression prevalence, number of psychiatrists, number of mental hospitals, and poverty rate.

Conclusions:

• Despite suicide being a major public health concern, global data is limited.
• While some socio-demographic factors (age, urbanization, literacy) showed negative correlation and psychosocial stressors (unemployment, alcohol misuse, poverty) showed positive correlation with suicide rates, these associations were not statistically significant.
• Further research with more comprehensive data is needed to understand and address the complexities of suicide globally.