Revisiting the relationship between economic uncertainty and suicide: An alternative approach

Suicide and economic uncertainty: New findings in a global setting

“…Here, like Abdou et al (2022), we can also speculate that negativity bias may be one of the mechanisms for high-income countries. The…”

“…concept of negativity bias refers to the assumption that adverse circumstances are generally more substantial, potent, capturing in combinations, and resourceful than their positive counterparts (Abdou et al, 2022). The principle of loss aversion in prospect theory is relevant to this negativity bias, which holds that people are more motivated by the threat of loss than by the promise of gain (Liu et al, 2022).…”

“…From the perspective of the strain theory of suicide (for more details, see Zhang ( 2019)), we speculate that it may have something to do with the higher presence of conflicting and competing forces in the lives of individuals in the middle-and low-income countries as compared to high-income countries. Changes in the level of economic uncertainty could not be discussed in absolute magnitude but rather as gains or losses relative to a reference point; how a person perceives and evaluates stimuli is directly related to the prior experience (Abdou et al, 2022). This is especially true for middle-and low-income countries when differences in social inequality are large.…”

“…Although suicide is under-reported and misclassified more frequently than most other causes of death, it is estimated that around 800,000 individuals take their own lives each year, with many more attempting suicide (Van Harmelen et al, 2019;WHO, 2021). For instance, the United States (US) witnessed over 47,500 deaths due to suicide in 2019, and the suicide rate escalated by 33% between 1999 and 2019 (Abdou et al, 2022). This highlights the crucial need to understand the underlying motivators and factors contributing to suicide to devise efficacious preventive interventions and enhance public awareness.…”

“…EPU index is constructed by counting newspaper articles' frequency, including economic, policy, and uncertainty terms. So far, it is mainly used as a determinant of suicides in a single country (Abdou et al, 2022;Antonakakis & Gupta, 2017;Vandoros et al, 2019;Vandoros & Kawachi, 2021).…”