There are increasing calls for tighter restrictions on social media use, particularly for children and young people but evidence shows potential harms co-exist on platforms alongside opportunities for crisis support and connection.

Researchers at the National Centre for Suicide Prevention and Self-Harm Research (NCSR) analysed the views of social media users themselves to find out more and discovered almost 90 per cent of respondents wanted more personal control over what they view.

In this cross-sectional study of 23 232 high school students from 15 US states, firearm carrying was associated with suicide attempts by any method, independent of sex, grade in school, race and ethnicity, and state firearm laws.

UNC School of Social Work received a $464,290 NCDHHS contract to expand Mental Health First Aid suicide prevention training across North Carolina colleges and universities. The project will train at least 600 students, faculty, staff and NCDHHS employees to recognize and respond to mental health crises, strengthening the state’s mental health support system.

Bonds with others and social recognition at the family, school and community levels were related to reduced suicide risk among Pennsylvania teens, according to a new study by Penn State researchers.

In a recent study, USC researchers with backgrounds across engineering, neurology, speech technology, artificial intelligence (AI), linguistics and clinical psychiatry teamed up to develop an assessment that classifies depression and suicidal ideation by analyzing biomarkers such as sweat, brain signals and eye movements, and using AI to build this classification system. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research project is titled “PRECOG: Multimodal integration of neural and biobehavioral signals for predicting preconscious responses” and began in June 2023. This research project could provide psychiatrists with a tool to identify and potentially predict high-risk individuals through biological signals, offering a more standardized way to monitor mental health and identify timely intervention points to help prevent suicide. The PRECOG project has resulted in five papers published in major journals this year, with one additional paper currently in the publication process, covering additional biomarkers and computational breakthroughs. Three papers focused on neural signals measured using electroencephalography (EEG). One, titled “Neural Evidence of Disrupted Self-Referential Processing in Suicidal Depression,” was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders and led by PhD student Colin McDaniel, who is advised by Narayanan and Assal Habibi, who is an associate professor of psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Another, titled “Time-Resolved EEG Decoding Reveals Altered Neural Dynamics of Affective Semantic Evaluation in Depression and Suicidality,” was published in Communications Biology and led by PhD student Woojae Jeong, who is part of USC Biomedical Imaging Group (BIG) and advised by Richard Leahy. Leahy is the USC Leonard Silverman Chair and professor of electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, and radiology. The third paper, titled “Neural Responses to Affective Sentences Reveal Signatures of Depression,” was published in Translational Psychiatry and led by PhD student Aditya Kommineni, who is also advised by Narayanan.The fifth paper, titled “A Point Process Model of Skin Conductance Responses in a Stroop Task for Predicting Depression and Suicidal Ideation,” used electrodermal activity (EDA), known as skin conductance, to collect sweat data as a biomarker. The study was also led by Avramidis.

Anew study involving Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), based on administrative data from South Korea, projects that as higher education and lifelong singlehood become more common, the composition of older-age suicide deaths may shift toward never-married men with tertiary education. This does not mean that tertiary-educated individuals face higher suicide risks: their suicide rates remain lower than those of less educated groups. Rather, the projected shift is driven by population composition. As tertiary education becomes the norm among younger generations, the growing size of this group could lead to a higher absolute number of suicide deaths among tertiary-educated, never-married men.