Search

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess associations of various content areas of Twitter posts with help-seeking from the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline) and with suicides. Methods: We retrieved 7,150,610 suicide-related tweets geolocated to the United States and posted between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2018. Using a specially devised machine-learning approach, we categorized posts into content about prevention, suicide awareness, personal suicidal ideation without coping, personal coping and recovery, suicide cases and other. We then applied seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average analyses to assess associations of tweet categories with daily calls to the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline) and suicides on the same day. We hypothesized that coping-related and prevention-related tweets are associated with greater help-seeking and potentially fewer suicides. Results: The percentage of posts per category was 15.4% (standard deviation: 7.6%) for awareness, 13.8% (standard deviation: 9.4%) for prevention, 12.3% (standard deviation: 9.1%) for suicide cases, 2.4% (standard deviation: 2.1%) for suicidal ideation without coping and 0.8% (standard deviation: 1.7%) for coping posts. Tweets about prevention were positively associated with Lifeline calls (B = 1.94, SE = 0.73, p = 0.008) and negatively associated with suicides (B = −0.11, standard error = 0.05, p = 0.038). Total number of tweets were negatively associated with calls (B = −0.01, standard error = 0.0003, p = 0.007) and positively associated with suicide, (B = 6.4 × 10−5, standard error = 2.6 × 10−5, p = 0.015). Conclusion: This is the first large-scale study to suggest that daily volume of specific suicide-prevention-related social media content on Twitter corresponds to higher daily levels of help-seeking behaviour and lower daily number of suicide deaths. Preregistration: As Predicted, #66922, 26 May 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media stories featuring stories of personal experiences of coping with suicidal ideation have been shown to decrease suicide risk, but it is unclear whether more impersonal awareness materials have similar effects. This study aimed to test the impact of impersonal educative news articles featuring interviews with suicide prevention experts. Because the impact of news articles may be determined by the articles' pull quotes and headlines, we also aimed to compare the impact of two versions of the same suicide prevention news article. One version featured headlines and pull quotes highlighting the message that suicide is preventable, whereas the other version focused on the message that suicide is prevalent. In a web-based randomized controlled trial, n = 425 participants either read a news article featuring a prevention expert with one of the above versions of the same text or an article unrelated to suicide. Data on suicidal ideation, stigmatizing attitudes toward suicidal individuals, policy attitudes toward suicide prevention, help-seeking intentions, and assumptions on the prevalence of suicide-related behavior were measured with questionnaires. The assumed prevalence of suicide in the population was greater in both intervention groups than in the control group, but the articles did not have an impact on other outcomes, and there were no differences for variations in headlines and pull quotes. Impersonal suicide prevention articles appear safe to use and do not have an impact on suicide risk factors in general population samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two major American icons, in a span of days in June 2018 represent a unique and tragic natural experiment to characterize associations with actual suicides in the aftermath of celebrity suicides. The aim of this study was to identify changes in suicide counts after their deaths. Methods: Suicide data were obtained from the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public-use mortality file. A time-series analysis was performed, examining monthly suicide data by age group (⩽19, 20–44, 45–64 and ⩾65 years), for both men and women, for all suicide methods and for hanging versus non-hanging methods, from January 1999 to December 2018. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving-average models were fitted to the pre-June 2018 period, estimating suicides in subsequent months and identifying deviations from expected values. The volume of Twitter posts about Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain was used as a proxy of societal attention. Results: Tweets about the celebrities were mainly concentrated in June 2018 and faded quickly in July. Total suicides exceeded the 95% confidence interval for June and approximated the upper limit of the 95% confidence interval in July. Over this 2-month span, there were 418 (95% confidence interval = [184, 652]) more suicides than expected, including 275 (95% confidence interval = [79, 471]) excess suicides in men and 182 (95% confidence interval = [93, 271]) in women. These equate to 4.8%, 4.1% and 9.1% increases above expected counts. There were 392 (95% confidence interval = [271, 514]) excess suicides by hanging, a 14.5% increase, with no significant increase in all other methods combined. Conclusion and Relevance: These findings demonstrate that mortality following celebrity suicides can occur at a similar magnitude to that observed for other public health emergencies. They underscore the urgency for interventions to mitigate imitation effects after celebrity suicide reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine the associations between religion, suicidal behavior, attitudes and psychological distress in 5572 students from 12 countries by means of a self-report questionnaire. Our results showed that an affiliation with Islam was associated with reduced risk for suicide ideation, however affiliating with Orthodox Christianity and no religion was related to increased risk for suicide ideation. While affiliating with Buddhism, Catholic religion and no religion was associated with lowered risk for attempting suicide, affiliation with Islam was related to heightened risk for attempting suicide. Affiliation with Hinduism, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, other religions and with no religion was associated with decreased risk for psychological distress but those reported affiliating with Islam evinced greater risk for psychological distress. The associations of the strength of religious belief to suicidal ideation and attempts were in the expected direction for most but had a positive relation in respondents affiliating with Catholicism and other religions. Students reporting affiliation with Islam, the Christian Orthodox religion and Buddhism were the least accepting of suicide but they displayed a more confronting interpersonal style to an imagined peer with a suicidal decision. It was concluded that the protective function of religion in educated segments of populations (university students) and in university students residing in Muslim countries where freedom from religion is restricted or religion is normative and/or compulsory is likely to be limited. Our findings suggest that public policies supporting religious freedom may augment the protective function of religion against suicide and psychological distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the question whether personal suicidality is reflected in individual music preferences has been discussed. We assessed associations of preferred music genres and cumulative exposure to and rating of 50 preselected songs, including 25 suicide-related songs, with suicide risk factors in an online survey with 943 participants. Preferences for sad music were associated with high psychoticism, while fanship of music genres with predominantly joyful contents was linked to low psychoticism. There was a dose-response relationship of positive rating of suicide songs with high life satisfaction and low hopelessness. Music preferences partly reflect suicide risk factors, but enjoyment of suicide songs is negatively associated with risk factors of suicide, which may indicate a psychological defense mechanism against suicidal impulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have suggested associations between personality dimensions and body image constructs, but these have not been conclusively established. In two studies, we examined direct associations between the Big Five dimensions and two body image constructs, actual-ideal weight discrepancy and body appreciation. In Study 1, 950 women completed measures of both body image constructs and a brief measure of the Big Five dimensions. In Study 2, 339 women completed measures of the body image constructs and a more reliable measure of the Big Five. Both studies showed that Neuroticism was significantly associated with actual-ideal weight discrepancy (positively) and body appreciation (negatively) once the effects of body mass index and social status had been accounted for. These results are consistent with the suggestion that Neuroticism is a trait of public health significance requiring attention by body image scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of mental health literacy is well-developed, but the basic methodology used in this research (i.e., the use of text-based vignettes) has not changed substantively in over two decades of work. Here, we developed novel filmed disclosures to re-assess mental health literacy of depression in a preregistered study utilizing a randomized, fully within-subjects design. A total of 405 adults from Austria (57% women, age M = 32.5 years) viewed short (~3 min) filmed disclosures by a female or male target and were asked to report if they thought anything was wrong with the targets and, if so, to describe what they thought was wrong. Participants also rated the targets on a range of attitudinal dimensions and completed measures of conformity to masculine norms and expressivity. The majority of participants (93.8%) correctly identified that something was wrong with the targets and, of those that did, the majority (69.2%) correctly described cases of depression. Neither target nor participant gender significantly influenced symptom recognition. Gendered effects were also largely null in terms of perceived distress, treatment difficulty, sympathy, and likelihood of recommending help for the targets, and both conformity to masculine norms and expressivity had minimal impact on attitudinal dimensions. These results highlight the potential utility of filmed disclosures in the study of mental health literacy and suggest that gendered effects reported in previous studies may be an artifact of the use of text-based vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]