Every year, over 700,000 people die from suicide globally. Each of these represents a tragedy, with each being suggested to leave behind around 100 people affected by the loss. This adds up to over 70 million people per year affected directly by suicide. Yet, the reasons people may be at risk of suicide are complex and often poorly understood. Evidence shows that mentally unhealthy people are less likely to participate in research studies, and amongst study participants, the types of people who are more likely to die by suicide (for instance middle-aged men) are often the people who report feeling least mental distress.
This project will investigate whether the difference between types of people who take part in studies and the people in the general population can explain the different results between those who die by suicide and those who report poor mental health.
Understanding how different recruitment practices influence study results and why people participate in mental health studies allows researchers to correct for this This will ultimately help us better identify what puts people at risk of dying by suicide and help those most in need of mental health support. This work aims to break a vicious cycle where research can exclude certain groups, conclude that those groups aren’t at as great a risk, and go on to further exclude them from research and possible interventions.
By using real-world health data, including over 3.5 million anonymised mental health records, Dr. Griffith will first evaluate and quantify the impact of research study recruitment processes and how these can influence study findings. He will also interview participants with experience of suicidal ideation from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and patients/service-users from Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust to try to understand barriers to, and facilitators of, research participation amongst service-users and research participants.
Then, using learnings from this first phase of the project, he will work together with people who have lived and living experience of mental distress and suicidal ideation to co-produce an infographic/comic report on the consequences of non-representative research and the ways in which research studies can better recruit a wider range of people that is more representative. This resource will be circulated to NHS trusts and researchers to aid in recruitment efforts.
This work improves our understanding of the impact of selection bias when it comes to mental health research and informs best practice guidelines on volunteer recruitment for future research studies. It will improve our understanding of suicide risk amongst the population where participant data are already collected, as well as ensure future data collection efforts are as fair as possible.
By reducing barriers to all participants in in suicide research we can better understand who is at the greatest risk and better prioritise support for them.
Dr Gareth Griffith is a senior Research Associate in Quantitative Bias and Causal Inference at the University of Bristol.
Gareth’s work has been published in journals such as Nature Communications and in 2020 he was invited to join the National Cohort Study COVID-19 task force, working collaboratively with dozens of other researchers.
Gareth has worked extensively with three national mental health charities, Time to Change, Mind and Student Minds, and has previously appeared on an MQ webinar on mental health inequalities which you can watch here. He also has a TEDx talk on his own personal experience of suicidal ideation and his subsequent research which has been viewed close to a million times.
“An MQ Fellowship would let me continue to engage with passionate individuals and researchers from across the world, continuing my mission to improve mental health, and integrate lived-experience voices into our understanding.”
This project is generously supported by The Garfield Weston Foundation.
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