Life-History Factors Influence Teenagers’ Suicidal Ideation: A Model Selection Analysis of the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth

Abstract

Suicidality is an important contributor to disease burden worldwide. We examine the developmental and environmental correlates of reported suicidal ideation at age 15 and develop a new evolutionary model of suicidality based on life history trade-offs and hypothesized accompanying modulations of cognition. Data were derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (Statistics Canada) which collected information on children’s social, emotional, and behavioral development in eight cycles between 1994 and 2009. We take a model selection approach to understand thoughts of suicide at age 15 ( N ≈ 1,700). The most highly ranked models include social support, early life psychosocial stressors, prenatal stress, and mortality cues. Those reporting consistent early life stress had 2.66 greater odds of reporting thoughts of suicide at age 15 than those who reported no childhood stress. Social support of the primary caregiver, neighborhood cohesion, nonkin social support of the adolescent, and the number of social support sources are all associated with suicidal thoughts, where greater neighborhood cohesion and social support sources are associated with a reduction in experiencing suicidal thoughts. Mother’s prenatal smoking throughout pregnancy is associated with a 1.5 greater odds of suicidal thoughts for adolescents compared to children whose mother’s reported not smoking during pregnancy. We discuss these findings in light of evolutionary models of suicidality. This study identifies both positive and negative associations on suicidal thoughts at age 15 and considers these in light of adaptive response models of human development. Findings are relevant for mental health policy.

Factors influencing suicidal tendencies during COVID-19 pandemic in Korean multicultural adolescents: a cross-sectional study

“…When controlling for other influencing factors, social support was a major factor influencing teenagers’ suicidal thoughts [ 33 ]. The social support of primary caregivers, intimacy with neighbours, the number of social support resources, and the unrelated racial social support of teenagers are correlated with a decline in suicidal thoughts [ 34 ]. Therefore, early intervention for multicultural adolescents should be made to prevent suicide attempts by establishing a social support system for families, schools and communities.…”

“…In addition, since few teenagers with suicidal tendencies in our study said they had little stress, perceived stress may not have affected their suicidal tendencies. Nevertheless, according to a longitudinal study of teenagers in Canada [ 34 ], in the case of constant stress in childhood, the reported rate of suicidal thoughts in the around the age of 15 was 2.66 times higher than that of those who did not. Considering these results, we cannot rule out the long-term effects of sustained perceived stress on suicidal tendencies.…”

The Association of Sex Ratio on Suicide Rates in United States Counties: An Exploration of Mechanisms

“…Understanding the factors that affect suicidal behaviors is an important area of research that has led to insights from a variety of approaches, including ecological studies (McCleary et al 2002;Dixon et al 2007;Brenner et al 2011;Luo et al 2011), individual-level demographic correlates (Spicer and Miller 2000;Denney et al 2009), clinical risk assessments (Carter et al 2017;Tello et al 2020;Nock et al 2010), and evolutionary cross-cultural perspectives (Syme et al 2016;Syme and Hagen 2019;DeCatanzaro 1980;Soper 2018;Stack 2000;Ziker and Snopkowski 2020). Unfortunately, even with extensive research across a variety of fields, suicide rates continue to have an upward trend in the United States across all age groups under 75 (Hedegaard et al 2020).…”

“…Both of these models suggest that fatal suicide is an unfortunate byproduct of the honest signal, and may help explain the large discrepancy in numbers of suicidal attempts compared to fatal suicide. Other hypotheses focus on suicide as maladaptive, a potential mismatch between prior and current environments (DeCatanzaro 1980), byproducts of our complex brains (Soper 2018), or a consequence of adaptive developmental trajectories (Ziker and Snopkowski 2020). Ethical concerns of working with humans and the challenge of inferring past evolutionary pressures makes it difficult to fully test these hypotheses.…”

Factores de Riesgo para Suicidalidad en Adolescentes Escolarizados de Nayarit, México

“…The separation of the parents increases the adolescent's problematics. 2016; Dykxhoorn, Hatcher, Roy-Gagnon & Colman, 2017;Kwok & Gu, 2019;Wan et al, 2019;Whalen, Dixon-Gordon, Belden, Barch & Luby, 2015;Ziker & Snopkowski, 2020) por ello es considerado como problema de salud pública. Entonces resulta imperante comprender cuáles son los factores asociados a la suicidalidad en edades tempranas, así como la distinción de factores predisponentes, a los que se les tiene que prestar más atención para crear programas específicos de prevención en cada contexto.…”