The Role of Despair in Predicting Self-Destructive Behaviors

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Psychology
• Sociology

Background:

• Working-age mortality in the US is rising, driven by drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol-related deaths.
• These
• deaths of despair
• are hypothesized to stem from despair, but empirical evidence is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if despair predicts behaviors leading to
• deaths of despair
• and identify key despair measures.
• To evaluate the predictive value of despair against established risk factors.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from over 6000 individuals across five waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.
• Applied supervised machine learning to assess despair's role in predicting self-destructive behaviors.
• Compared predictive performance of despair measures against clinical and prior behavioral predictors.

Main Results:

• Despair underperformed compared to clinical factors for suicidal ideation and heavy drinking.
• Despair outperformed clinical factors and prior behaviors for illegal drug use and prescription drug misuse.
• Predictive accuracy and the importance of despair indicators varied across different self-destructive behaviors.

Conclusions:

• Self-destructive behaviors associated with
• deaths of despair
• are distinct, with varied pathways from despair.
• Despair may not be a unifying framework for understanding the midlife health crisis.