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This article aims to focus on deaths by suicide in relation to UK welfare reform as a case study to question one of suicidology’s most dominant theories – the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (Joiner, 2005) and its influential ideas on “perceived burdensomeness” – as well as wider ideologies on suicide and mental health reflected in this approach.

This article draws on evidence from disabled people’s campaigning groups (primary sources) and research literature (secondary sources), which shows the negative psychological impact of burden discourse and how this shows up in people’s accounts of feeling suicidal, in suicide notes and in family accounts of those who have died by suicide. It uses this evidence to problematise the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (Joiner, 2005), specifically its ideas about “burden” as an individual misperception, and the assumption that suicide is always the outcome of mental health problems.

The findings highlight the systemic, intersectional and cumulative production of suicidality by governmental “welfare reform” in the UK, through positioning welfare claimants as “burdens” on society. They show that by locating the problem of burdensomeness in individual “misperceptions”, the Interpersonal Theory allows the government’s role in crafting stigmatisation and conditions of suicidality to be overlooked and to be reproduced.

The article raises urgent ethical questions about the application of approaches, such as the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide, to benefits-related suicides and calls for approaches to benefits-related harm and suicide to be rooted in social and disability justice.

Purpose: The author seeks to identify how suicide-bereaved individuals conceptualize their relationships with deceased loved ones. The author engages Durkheim’s theory of suicide to provide a new framework to analyze this population.

Methodology: The author uses qualitative research and coding methods to produce a secondary analysis of previously collected interview transcripts.

Findings: The author concludes that participants experience the suicide of a loved one as a social event, conceptualizing it similarly to how Durkheim defined his four suicide types – characterized by too much or too little regulation and/or integration.

Research Limitations: As a result of the secondary analysis, a lack of demographic information remains the largest limitation, and the available demographic information indicates the participant population is not a diverse one. Therefore, the larger analysis is limited.

Practical and Social Implications: This work provides potential ways to improve current prevention and postvention practices for both the suicide-bereaved and those struggling with suicidality. Subsequently, it may help to improve the health outcomes of these groups.

Originality: To the author’s current knowledge, this is the first published use of Durkheim’s Suicide (1897/1966) as a framework to directly examine the suicide-bereaved population in this way. Thus, this work contributes to suicidology and sociology more broadly in two ways: by providing a new way to understand and ultimately help a vulnerable population and by providing a new use of a classic theory.

The purpose of this paper is to present some results of a qualitative study exploring people's memories of the pathways to the first episode of self-wounding. Specifically it will focus on the issue of “suicidality”.

In total, 11 participants, aged between 19 and 50, were described. They were asked to describe their first episode of self-wounding. The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured topic guide. An initial thematic and a subsequent narrative analysis were used to explore the participants’ stories.

The narratives of self-wounding show that the first episode occurs in a complex landscape of interactions between events and emotions. Even when participants were aware of suicidal feelings before self-wounding, the suicidal intention was abandoned as the self-wounding was shown to be an effective method for dealing with distress. For most of the participants the self-wounding was not associated with suicidality but with a strong need to gain or regain control of an emotionally charged and chaotic environment.

Focusing on the first episode of self-harm holds the key to a better appreciation of the underlying meanings of self-wounding as a complex and dynamic experience. It can provide health care practitioners with a new direction to understanding people's individual motivations rather than focusing relying on behaviour generalised assumptions.

This study provides a rare insight into the first episode of self-harm as a unique event. It is also a rare example of publicly funded service-user research with a focus on issues which are meaningful to them.

An article in the NIJ Journal (Websdale, 2003) notes that domestic violence can provoke suicide. The 2003 Massachusetts Domestic Violence Homicide Report (Lauby et al, 2006) notes that suicide can be attributed to domestic violence incidents. Utah Domestic Violence Related Deaths 2006 (Utah Domestic Violence Council, 2006) notes that the majority of domestic violence‐related suicides are not covered in their report. The report Domestic Violence Fatalities (2005) (Utah Department of Health, 2006) notes that there were 44 suicides and 21 homicide domestic violence‐related deaths in Utah in 2005. Using data from the Surveillance for Violent Deaths ‐ National Violent Death Reporting System, 16 States, 2005 (Karch et al, 2008), it is possible to extrapolate that as many as 7,832 male and 1,958 domestic violence‐related suicides occur annually in the US. When domestic violence‐related suicides are combined with domestic violence homicides, the total numbers of domestic violence‐related deaths are higher for males than females. This paper recommends that to understand the broad scope and tragic impact of domestic violence, further research is needed concerning domestic violence‐related suicide.

Elder suicide is a major problem, particularly in the USA, that accounts for 15.9 in 100,000 deaths, or an average of one death every 95 minutes. The rate of elder suicide is higher than that of any other age group. Unlike teens, or younger age groups, the elderly attempting suicide are largely successful. This selective literature guide includes materials on elder suicide that deal with all aspects of the topic, including identification of those at risk, prevention, and survivors, as well as resources addressing alternative views of suicide, such as assisted, rational, and pre‐emptive suicide.

This essay aims to describe how the author began his career as a suicidologist and his style that made him so productive.

The author used autobiographical details to illustrate the elements of his career.

Childhood experiences include sleeping in air raid shelter from 1942 to 1945 in London (UK), while his style includes obsessiveness in reading everything on suicide, applying ideas from other fields (such as economics) to the study of suicide and obtaining academic freedom early in his career.

The essay offers guidelines for others who are in the early stages of a career as a researcher.

Death by suicide among Black people in the USA have increased by 35.6% within the past decade. Among youth under the age of 24 years old, death by suicide among Black youth have risen substantially. Researchers have found that structural inequities (e.g. educational attainment) and state-specific variables (e.g. minimum wage, incarceration rates) may increase risk for suicide among Black people compared to White people in the USA. Given the limited understanding of how such factors systematically affect Black and White communities differently, this paper aims to examine these relationships across US states using publicly available data from 2015 to 2019.

Data were aggregated from various national sources including the National Center for Education Statistics, the Department of Labor, the FBI’s Crime in the US Reports and the Census Bureau. Four generalized estimating equations (GEE) models were used to examine the impact of state-level variables on suicide rates: Black adults suicide rate, Black youth (24 years and younger) suicide rate, White adult suicide rate and White youth suicide rate. Each model includes state-level hate group rates, minimum wage, violent crime rates, gross vacancy rates, and race-specific state-level poverty rates, incarceration rates and graduation rates.

Across all GEE models, suicide rates rose between 2015–2019 (ß = 1.11 – 2.78; ß = 0.91 – 1.82; ß = 0.52 – 3.09; ß = 0.16 – 1.53). For the Black adult suicide rate, state rates increased as the proportion of Black incarceration rose (ß = 1.14) but fell as the gross housing vacancy rates increased (ß = −1.52). Among Black youth, state suicide rates rose as Black incarcerations increased (ß = 0.93). For the adult White suicide rate, state rates increased as White incarceration (ß = 1.05) and percent uninsured increased (ß = 1.83), but fell as White graduation rates increased (ß = −2.36). Finally, among White youth, state suicide rates increased as the White incarceration rate rose (ß = 0.55) and as the violent crime rate rose (ß = 0.55) but decreased as state minimum wages (ß = −0.61), White poverty rates (ß = −0.40) and graduation rates increased (ß = −0.97).

This work underscores how structural factors are associated with suicide rates, and how such factors differentially impact White and Black communities.

The phenomenon of murder-suicide (aka. homicide-suicide) makes a sizeable impact on current public perceptions and policies regarding mental illness and risk for violence. However, within the past 25 years, our understanding of murder-suicide has remained relatively stable, and so has our relative inability to reliably predict and prevent it. The purpose of this paper is to propose pathways for furthering a cogent understanding of murder-suicide that may inform specific predictive and preventative practices.

Research literature regarding empirical and theoretical positions in the fields of murder-suicide, homicide, and suicide are reviewed and discussed.

While murder-suicide has many similarities to both homicide and suicide, no current theories of either alone have been successful in fully incorporating the phenomenon of murder-suicide. Theories specific to murder-suicide as a unique form of violence are in need of further research.

Developing and empirically testing theories of murder-suicide may lead to a vast and needed improvement of our understanding, prediction, and prevention of these tragedies.

Telephone crisis services are increasingly subject to a requirement to “prove their worth” as a suicide prevention strategy. The purpose of this paper is to: first, provide a detailed overview of the evidence on the impact of telephone crisis services on suicidal users; second, determine the limitations of the outcome measures used in this evidence; and third, suggest directions for future research.

MEDLINE via Pubmed (from 1966), PsycINFO APA (from 1967) and ProQuest Dissertation and Theses (all to 4 June 2015) were searched. Papers were systematically extracted by title then abstract according to predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria.

In total, 18 articles met inclusion criteria representing a range of outcome measures: changes during calls, reutilization of service, compliance with advice, caller satisfaction and counsellor satisfaction. The majority of studies showed beneficial impact on an immediate and intermediate degree of suicidal urgency, depressive mental states as well as positive feedback from users and counsellors.

A major limitation pertains to differences in the use of the term “suicidal”. Other limitations include the lack of long-term follow-up and of controlled research designs. Future research should include a focus on long-term follow-up designs, involving strict data protection. Furthermore, more qualitative research is needed in order to capture the essential nature of the intervention.

This paper attempts to broaden the study and the concept of “effectiveness” as hitherto used in the literature about telephone crisis services and offers suggestions for future research.