Understanding Suicide Risk in Men

New blog by SBRL’s Cara Richardson summarising findings from her recent systematic review examining suicide risk factors in men.

By Cara Richardson

Suicides in men outnumber women in almost every country in the world (Naghavi, 2019), with the exception of the 15-19 year age group. In Scotland males accounted for almost 75% of all suicide deaths in 2019 (ScotPHO, 2020). Each life lost to suicide is a preventable tragedy and more needs to be done to understand the risk factors in individuals who take their own life.

A well-known theory in this field is the Gender Paradox of Suicide (Canetto & Sakinofsky, 1998) where women are more likely to attempt suicide, but men are more likely to die by suicide. Due to this increased risk in men we need to understand which risk factors are particularly relevant in this group. Recent reviews (Franklin et al., 2017; O’Connor & Nock, 2014; Turecki & Brent, 2016; Turecki et al., 2019) have highlighted advances in our understanding of risk factors for suicide in men and women, yet our ability to predict suicide remains no better than chance.

Continue reading at Ihawkes website.

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Main reference:

Richardson, C., Robb, K. A., & O’Connor, R. C. (2021). A systematic review of suicidal behaviour in men: A narrative synthesis of risk factors. Social Science & Medicine, 113831.

You can find Cara on Twitter and Research Gate.