Self harm and Suicide Prevention

Key people: Dr Maria Michail

Tackling youth suicide rates with a novel system dynamics modelling approach.

Suicide is a leading cause of mortality among young people aged 15-29 globally. The EU-funded SEYMOUR project explores how systems modelling and simulation can inform strategic decision making for suicide prevention in young people aged 12-25 in Australia and the UK.

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Key people: Dr Maria Michail

NSPCC Childline is the biggest helpline in the world, receiving approximately 300,000 substantive interactions each day via their website or by phone. The amount of online contact made through Childline is increasing, and now approximately 75% of all contact-making takes place via instant messaging, email and the website’s message board. We are working with the NSPCC to help the charity in its response to children who are at risk of suicide.

We are reviewing existing Childline policies and practices, and carrying out focus groups and interviews with frontline staff at Childline and other helpline organisations across the world. The aim is to ensure Childline’s ability to assess and respond to suicide risk is informed by the best available evidence, and to ensure staff and volunteers have the best possible skills and the confidence to provide advice, support and to make referrals, where appropriate, to other frontline services.

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Key people: Dr Anna Lavis

This study will offer understandings of why some young people who self-injure turn to social media for support and care. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the study will reflect on the implications, as well as lessons, for prevention and intervention posed by this coming together of self-injury and social media.

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Key people: Dr Anna Lavis

There is global concern about the potentially detrimental impact of social media on young people’s mental health. Against this background, calls for online technology providers to enhance safeguarding have particularly emphasised the dangers of self-harm and suicide content. This has been framed as encouraging or even causing acts such as self-cutting and burning, and completed suicide.

In tandem, since the UK’s lockdown in March 2020, there has been a growing awareness of the mental health impact of COVID-19 and the ensuing social restrictions. To date, however, these discussions have not included an attention to social media. This is a crucial part of assessing the impact of COVID-19 on self-harm and suicidality in the UK, especially amongst young people. Social media offers insights that go beyond the linearity of an assumed trajectory from lockdown to rising rates of poor mental health and suicide. Instead, it offers real-time and nuanced understandings of why, and importantly when, suicidal acts and self-injurious behaviour may rise, showing their complex relationships with the current situation.

Against the background of our previous Welllcome-funded research, we are therefore analysing the impact of COVID-19 on online self-harm and suicide content, through funding from Samaritans. Using online ethnography, we are collecting data across a range of social media platforms, from January 2020 onwards. This research will provide rapid results that will be of use to policymakers, practitioners and the third sector as we move through and beyond the current pandemic.

Funder: Samaritans

Key People: Professor Rachel Upthegrove

Development of evidence for clinicians to better identify and intervene in depression and suicidal thinking in the context of emerging mental illness: this includes longitudinal study of young people with first episode psychosis, and those at risk of psychosis.

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