Data access has been approved for a study to help us understand how changes in social determinants of health and social behaviors, particularly the increasing use of online media, may have changed the geographic and spatial distributions of youths' suicidal behaviors.
Despite rising public awareness, national prevention strategies, and investments in research and treatment, suicide remains a leading cause of death among youth aged 10-29 worldwide. Suicide accounts for 25-30% of all deaths in Canadian youth and recent studies estimate that the prevention of suicide clusters could avert 500 suicide attempts among Canadian youth each year.
“To prevent suicide clusters, we need to know how rates, patterns, and mechanisms of suicide clustering have been affected by rising use of online and social media among youth, and sociodemographic drivers of suicide clustering in BC,” says project lead, Brianna Turner, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria.
The project will examine time-based trends in spatial and temporal patterns of suicide-related hospital admissions and deaths in British Columbians aged 10-29 from 1998-2018. The team hypothesize that that geospatial patterns of youth suicidal behaviours in early years (roughly 1998-2007) will be characterized primarily by point clustering (localized in time and space), whereas youth suicidal behaviours in later years (roughly 2008-2018) will be increasingly characterized by mass clustering (localized in time but not space), reflecting more diffuse exposure and greater assortative relating among geographically-distant youth via online media. Time-based trends will be analysed by year and multi-year rolling averages, and examine whether clusters are predicted by various social determinants of health, and whether secular changes are predicted by changes in youths' online access and behavior.
The project will also investigate time-based changes in proposed mechanisms of suicide contagion. The hypothesis here is that youth whose suicidal behaviour occurs within a spatial or temporal cluster will be more demographically and clinically similar to one another, compared to youth with non-cluster suicidal behaviours. In addition, evidence for imitation will increase across study years, while geographic stratification of risk will account for less variance in spatial-temporal patterns in later versus earlier years, as use of online and social media rises.
Finally the study will examine whether youth suicide clusters can be predicted from healthcare utilization or online search and sharing behaviour, to improve monitoring and prevention of suicide clustering. The team will test the hypothesis that there will be more youth primary care and hospital visits than usual within 365 days of a suicide cluster, compared to control periods in the same region. Also, that there will be more suicide-related online searches and social media posts than usual within 365 days of each suicide cluster, compared to matched control periods.
While participants are not expected to directly benefit from this research, it is expected this study will add to what is currently known about suicide clustering in youth, including whether patterns have changed over the 20-year period during which Internet and social media became more widely used and whether observed covariates are differentially associated with clusters that are comprised of suicide deaths, attempts or both. Project findings will be presented at research and knowledge user conferences, submitted for publication, and appear in reports for policymakers focused on youth health and wellbeing.
For the project PopData will link Researcher-collected data with data sets from the BC Ministry of Health, BC Ministry of Education and Childcare, BC Community Health Atlas, BC Mental health Substance Use directory, BC Liquor Control and Licensing, Canadian Census, BC Adolescent Health Survey, and BC School Satisfaction Survey.
The project is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
