Department of Sociology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 26;16(4):e0250794. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250794. eCollection 2021.
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.
在自杀的社会行为研究中，人们普遍认为，当面临近端应激源时，较高的压力水平和较低的经济地位会放大自杀的脆弱性，这反映了健康心理学和社会学中传统上普遍存在的观点，即将不利的生活环境与不良的心理健康结果联系起来。然而，仔细思考一下，就会有强有力的理论理由怀疑，在危机发生的情况下，更多的压力或处于更紧张的环境总是会增加自杀的脆弱性。利用韩国青少年的大型全国代表性公共调查数据，我表明，最近的心理社会危机与自杀意念之间的关联，往往会随着感知压力水平的提高和家庭经济地位的改善而变得更强。总体而言，最近暴露于心理社会危机后自杀意念的概率增加，在压力或家庭经济地位中等水平时最小，在低水平或高水平时最大。一项补充性研究表明，所确定的调节效应主要是由于个体层面的压力或家庭经济地位，而学校层面的背景影响相对较少。这些发现初步证明了自杀意念的应激接种假说。关于自杀脆弱性的研究可以从增加对处于不利或不利生活环境中的机制的关注中受益，这些机制可以防止近端应激源产生自杀诱导作用。
