Suicide rates amongst adolescents A mental health practitioner’s perspective in Poland and a global, Big Data context

Abstract

The paper contributes to mental health studies of children and youth’s suicide and suicide attempts. Inspired by early sociological concepts such as Durkheim’s contribution to understanding suicide through social anomy, we ran statistical analysis of worldwide suicide rates and tested for correlation between suicide rates amongst children and youth and “Big Data” on social, educational, economic and environmental factors around the world. Amongst them we considered 88 variables including Human Development Index (HDI) and its indicators, rates of religious observance and denomination, and even the hours of sunlight and the average temperature in each country. The statistical section of the paper is preceded by the results of analysis from the anonymised mental health records of adolescents with suicidal and self-harming tendencies. The data came from a Polish psychotherapist and was accompanied by in-depth analysis of contributing factors from purposely selected, attempted suicide cases, in order to enrich the statistical perspective with biological, individual, environmental and situational factors. Finally, we identify trigger factors and protective indicators, derived from both the statistical and the empirical part of our study.