Longitudinal Relationships Between Positive Affect, Loneliness, and Suicide Ideation: Age‐Specific Factors in a General Population

Abstract

The aims of this study were to analyze whether positive and negative affect, social support, and loneliness are factors longitudinally related to suicide ideation in the general population in different age groups. A total of 2,392 individuals from a nationally representative sample of the Spanish general population were evaluated in 2011-2012 and in 2014-2015. After including relevant control variables in the analyses, lower positive affect was prospectively related to ideation in 18- to 59-year-old individuals, whereas feelings of loneliness were related to ideation in 60-year-and-older individuals. Social support was not associated with suicide ideation in any age group. These results are in line with the need for age-tailored suicide prevention programs. The present findings might also suggest that health care professionals should consider feelings of loneliness rather than social support to assess the presence of suicide ideation in older people.

Gratitude diary for the management of suicidal inpatients: A randomized controlled trial

“…The interpersonal theory of suicide (Van Orden et al, 2010) hypothesizes that suicidal ideation occurs when subjects experience a combination of two interpersonal constructs: low belongingness (or social disconnection) and high burdensomeness. Loneliness (i.e., feeling of emptiness, isolation, or unwanted solitude) has been positively associated with suicidal ideation (Bennardi et al, 2017) and negatively with gratitude (Caputo, 2015). In fact, gratitude aims at increasing stable connection feelings with others without attachment (Sahdra, Shaver, & Brown, 2010).…”

“…Expectation for the future may remain negative even when experiencing optimism for a given life experience (Gillham, Shatte, Reivich, & Seligman, 2001). Loneliness (i.e., feeling of emptiness, isolation, or unwanted solitude) has been positively associated with suicidal ideation (Bennardi et al, 2017) and negatively with gratitude (Caputo, 2015). In a sample of 284 college students, optimism weakened the relationship between hopelessness and suicidal ideation, over the influence of depressive symptoms (Hirsch & Conner, 2006) The interpersonal theory of suicide (Van Orden et al, 2010) hypothesizes that suicidal ideation occurs when subjects experience a combination of two interpersonal constructs: low belongingness (or social disconnection) and high burdensomeness.…”

Living alone, loneliness and lack of emotional support as predictors of suicide and self-harm: a nine-year follow up of the UK Biobank cohort

“…Identifying robust risk factors for suicidal behaviour is methodologically challenging for a number of reasons, not least because suicide is a rare event (Klonsky et al, 2016; Stickley and Koyanagi, 2016). Most studies of loneliness and suicidal behaviour have used self-reported measures of suicidality (Bennardi et al, 2019), which may be prone to reporting biases (Beutel et al, 2017; Stickley and Koyanagi, 2016), and only a few studies (mostly case-control studies) have investigated loneliness as a potential cause of deaths by suicide (Courtin and Knapp, 2017; Holt-Lunstad et al, 2015).…”

Suicide Rate, Depression and the Human Development Index: An Ecological Study From Mexico

“…The phenomenon of loneliness is defined as a discrepancy between current social relationships and individual preference; the discrepancy leads to a negative experience of feeling alone, and dysphoria of feeling socially isolated, even when the person is accompanied by family and friends (27). In this perspective, loneliness is an independent phenomenon of depression with well-defined dimensions (28).…”