A Network-of-Problems Approach to Understanding Causes of Adult Suicides in the US

• In Event: Revitalizing the Sociology of Suicide

Abstract

Numerous social, psychological, and biological risk factors for suicide are well-documented in the literature. But less well-understood are factors that actually motivate suicide and the interconnections between those vulnerabilities. Using administrative data on a census of over 100,000 adult US suicides over a 4-year period, we investigate a large set of adverse circumstances that were reported in official documents related to each suicide case, and investigate inter-linkages between problems using tools from network analysis. Our preliminary analyses show that majority of suicides occur among people suffering from some form of mental illness or cognitive atypicality. In particular, depression serves as the most “powerful” problem that connects various other adverse conditions and life circumstances across multiple life domains. Using a community detection algorithm, we identify 7 types of adult suicides in the US, that reflect the clustering of specific types of problems within specific demographic groups.

Authors

• Tamkinat Rauf, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Jeremy Freese, Stanford University