Citation

Jeong T. PLoS One 2021; 16(4): e0250794.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0250794

PMID

33901265

PMCID

PMC8075251

Abstract

It is widely held in socio-behavioral studies of suicide that higher levels of stress and lower levels of economic status amplify suicidal vulnerability when confronted with a proximal stressor, reflecting the traditionally prevalent understanding in health psychology and sociology that associates adverse life circumstances with undesirable mental health outcomes. However, upon reflection, there are strong theoretical reasons to doubt that having more stress or being in a more stressful environment always increases suicidal vulnerability given the occurrence of a crisis. Using large nationally representative public survey data on South Korean adolescents, I show that the association between recent psychosocial crisis and suicidal ideation often gets stronger with more favorable levels of perceived stress and improving levels of family economic status. Overall, the increase in the probability of suicidal ideation from recent exposure to a psychosocial crisis is consistently the smallest around medium levels of stress or family economic status and larger at low or high levels. A supplementary exercise suggests that the identified moderation effects operate mainly in virtue of individual-level stress or family economic status in the relative absence of contextual influences at the school level. The findings present preliminary evidence of the stress inoculation hypothesis with regard to suicidal ideation. Research on suicidal vulnerability could benefit from increased attentiveness to the mechanisms through which being in an adverse or unfavorable life situation could protect against the suicide-inducing effects of proximal stressors.

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; Cross-Sectional Studies; Female; Male; Adolescent; Adolescent Behavior; Suicidal Ideation; Databases, Factual; Republic of Korea; Stress, Psychological; Economic Status