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A disclaimer that we will be talking about the topic of suicide today.
Molly Magid: Welcome to UC Science Radio, where we interview a range of postgrad students to tune into the fresh voices entering the world of science and learn what sparked their passion. I’m Molly Magid, a Master’s student in the School of Biological Sciences.
Today I’m talking with Taylor-Jane Cox, a clinical and master’s student studying psychology. Her research focuses on the risk factors that contribute to and protective factors that buffer against hopelessness and suicidal ideation in young men, especially rural men. Her overall goal is to work to prevent suicides among young men in New Zealand.
Kia ora Taylor-Jane, Welcome to UC Science Radio!
Taylor-Jane Cox: Kia ora Molly, thanks for having me!
So you're studying psychology, but specifically, what is your research about?
TJC: For my research, I looked at psychological risk and protective factors of suicidality, which is both suicidal ideation and behaviours. So we were really interested in things that increased people's risk of suicide, but also things that would actually buffer or protect against suicide and go from a more positive psychology type of approach. So for our study, we looked at a range of different risk and protective factors that are quite well-known, and then we wanted to narrow those down and find out what was most significant for this particular group of people.
So, who exactly was in this study that you conducted?
TJC: I mean, it probably would be helpful to start with how the project even came to be. We wanted to look, first of all, at young men because about 75% of suicide in New Zealand is men, and the highest group is this really vulnerable stage between 18-30 years old. That's where we wanted to start first of all.
So we recruited over 500 people and then we had to narrow that down to about 450 because of different things. A third of them were identified as rural, which was a huge group of our men. Around 10% identified as Māori, in our group as well. We also had a real range, you know, usually this type of research is majority psychology students getting some extra credit, but we actually had people from all walks of life from different ethnicities to different ages, people that were employed but also people that were unemployed, and a third of our study had an official mental health diagnosis.
A really sad statistic that came out of our study was around 10% of the men identified as having attempted to take their life at some point or had serious suicidal behaviour, which to us was quite striking and also identifies the vulnerability of this group and why it's so important that we need to think about where our resources are going. And, as I said before, 75% of suicide is men, yet we don't tackle this as a gender problem, so that's just something that we have to start to think about as well.
What led you to focus more on rural men?
TJC: Yeah so we measured both people from urban and rural areas. The reason why we wanted to focus on rural men as well as their own type of group is because there are high rates of suicide in rural areas, and there's lots of things that contribute to that. For example you know social isolation, lack of supports in rural areas, poor mental health services, and also generally they're not really a group of people that are studied very often because they're quite hard to recruit.
A bit of, I guess a disclosure, I grew up rurally myself. So I grew up in the high country across the South Island in different places, and I kind of saw first-hand the impact of losing some people that I know to suicide, in rural areas, and seeing the wave effect it has on that society. Because in a rural area, it's a very small net of people. I also did work for a while for Youthline, which is a crisis line, and that kind of sparked my interest into wanting to research suicide. So it wasn't, probably, the easiest task to take, but yeah it was really rewarding.
I know, sometimes especially masculinity concepts, for example, often make men feel like they can't share emotions or like when they're going through a tough time, so in terms of first recruiting, but also getting your participants to share, how were you able to do that?
TJC: Great question, we put a lot of effort into designing the questionnaire, and how we wanted to structure it. And we developed this questionnaire based on all of these valid questionnaires that were already out there in the world, and we kind of compiled it all together. And we measured over twenty different things, but for my research I focused on a couple of key constructs, so we focused on hopelessness, which is a really strong predictor of both suicidal ideation and behaviour. And hopelessness is a construct around, you know, just feeling really depleted and not knowing if they can get through each day by day. And we also wanted to look at things like resilience and grit, which are these quite new and emerging protective factors of suicide.
I also had a lot of amazing help from some organisations. For example, The Will to Live Foundation helped me with recruitment, Young Farmers and all sorts of other rural connections that I tried to have. I think there's a big movement in New Zealand, in general, and especially around rural health, and I notice when you actually ask the question, sometimes people are willing to talk about it. I think maybe we're too scared sometimes in society to ask the questions first. But we structured the online questionnaire, it was safe and confidential. And we got some really good results, and people were really open with us, and that was fantastic.
What are some things that you found that you think could inform like an intervention or a programme that could be implemented to help this issue of young male suicides?
TJC: One interesting thing that we found with our study was this factor called grit. So grit's a term that's used in lots of different places, but we focused on the term that was invented by someone called Angela Duckworth. And so she's done a lot of research around grit, and she found that it kind of protects against all sorts of different negative outcomes for people. Basically, what it is, is passion and perseverance towards long-term goals and also being able to overcome challenges that people have in their lives, because life is really hard and everyone has bumps in their road and high grit means that you are able to persevere through those things and come out the other side. And we found that in the men that had high hopelessness, which is a strong predictor of suicide risk, but had high grit, had a lower score (in their suicide) in their suicide score.
So we measured a mixture of both suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviour, and we found that it just buffered against that relationship. They had some strengths, and I think we need to start to focus on that, because everyone has a strength in them, even if they don't feel like they do at the time, and we need to start focusing on the things that people are doing. So that's very exciting, it's very new, and there's still a lot of research that needs to be done. And I think it's really exciting that we're going to have more research come out about all these different types of protective factors.
And, you know, obviously this is a difficult topic, but for you what is the most exciting or engaging part of this research?
TJC: I think it's that I got a lot of amazing support on this research and a lot of people are really interested in it, which tells me that it was a gap. You wouldn't think that there was that many people out there struggling until we asked the questions. And I was lucky enough to talk about this last year on the Man Enough campaign, so that was a TV documentary that was with Matt Chisholm, and that was really exciting to be part of that as well. I think that we need to keep growing and starting to move towards this protective approach against suicide, because the way we've been approaching it hasn't been working and our stats are continuing to rise and so I think it needs a huge uphaul from the way we tackle it.
What is one big change that you'd like to see come out of your research?
TJC: One big change... I mean, as someone that works in the mental health sector, a billion dollars would be really nice. But definitely I think we need to focus on seeing what we can do in our communities, and starting to grow our connection. You know, it's a really difficult thing for anyone to come forward and talk about, so I really encourage people to go out there and reach out to them as opposed to, we have this message where we tell people: "oh reach out, reach out, there's supports reach out." But I think we actually need to turn the tables a little bit on that narrative. Social connectiveness, you know, is such an important factor in being mentally well, and so we need to really think about what types of groups and community supports we have out there that's beyond just the rugby clubs, for these vulnerable people out there. That's where I'd be wanting to see some change.
Thank you so much for talking with me.
TJC: No worries, it was great to be here. Thank you!
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