Research finding · January 2026
Commonly reported suicide risk and warning signs differ by sex and age
Suicide does not look the same across the lifespan, nor does it present in the same way for women and men. While suicide rates are higher among men and increase with age, some of the warning signs clinicians and researchers rely on (e.g., mental health diagnoses or recent contact with psychiatric services) are actually more common in women and younger people. This mismatch creates a challenge for prevention: the very indicators we tend to watch for may be less visible in groups at the highest risk for suicide. Understanding how patterns of distress differ by sex and age, especially in the period leading up to suicide, can help refine how we identify risk and support people more effectively.
Dr. Christian Rück used nationwide health and social registry data from Sweden to study nearly 20,000 people who died by suicide and compare them with more than 190,000 similar living individuals who matched on age and sex. They examined whether people had any of 25 commonly cited risk indicators in the year before death, including mental health diagnoses, self-harm, psychiatric care, medication use, serious physical illness, bereavement, unemployment, or financial stress. What Dr. Rück found was not that these indicators were unimportant, but that they appeared unevenly across groups. Women and younger people who died by suicide were more likely to have had these warning signs documented beforehand. In contrast, men and older adults who died by suicide were less likely to have had these indicators recorded at all. This means that many men and older adults may be at risk without ever appearing on clinicians’ or systems’ “radar.” At the same time, because men have higher overall suicide rates, men who did show these indicators were often at particularly high risk, though this may reflect a potential bias of not asking or recording risk factors for men. Overall, the findings suggest that suicide prevention efforts relying mainly on documented mental health or social warning signs may miss many at-risk men and older adults, pointing to the need for broader, more tailored approaches to identifying and supporting people in distress.
Citation: Johansson, F., Gunnarsson, L., Grossmann, L., Mataix-Cols, D., Fernández de la Cruz, L., Fazel, S., Gardner, R. M., Dalman, C., Wallert, J., & Rück, C. (2025). Patterns of sex-specific and age-specific risk indicators of suicide: a population-nested case-control study. BMJ mental health, 28(1), e301959. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjment-2025-301959
This finding comes from an AFSP-funded study — see the grant below ↓
