Unliveable

Our new report on how extreme wealth inequality contributes to the risk of suicide

This article discusses suicide rates across the UK. If you find any of the issues mentioned in this article distressing, we encourage you to reach out to the Samaritans, the national suicide charity. You can find their website here, or call 116 123 if you want to talk to someone.

Today we’re publishing a report that looks at the ways in which extreme wealth inequality contributes to the risk of suicide. The article below introduces the main themes of the report, and you can read the full report online or as a PDF. Please help us by sharing the report on social media (here on Substack, but also on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Twitter/X).

Suicide rates in the UK are on the rise. In the year 2023/24, 7,055 deaths caused by suicide were registered in the UK, representing the highest rate in England and Wales since 1999. Why?

I wrote a piece earlier this year on the potential relationship between suicide and wealth inequality. In that post, I highlighted the lack of research on the effects of wealth and wealth inequality on suicidality compared to other socio-economic measures. Indeed,extensive research has linked socio-economic inequalities and deprivation to an increased risk of suicide. Housing insecurity, unemployment, insecure work, income inequality, income deprivation, economic uncertainty, debt, and area-level deprivation have all been connected to an increased risk of suicidal ideation and behaviour.

However, similar research on the effects of wealth inequality on suicide is lacking. We are calling for greater engagement with the role of wealth inequality on the risk of suicide because it has such deep, pervasive effects on society. As we demonstrated in our Wealth Gap Risk Register, wealth inequality is associated with worse mental and physical health outcomes, educational outcomes, career opportunities, social connections, social cohesion, housing access, and more. To ignore the effects of wealth inequality on society when studying suicide is to ignore a critical component of the socio-economic context in which lives are trying to be lived. We argue that wealth inequality exerts a powerful negative influence on the extent to which life is ‘liveable’, by profoundly altering our social, economic, political, and psychological experience for the worse.

No national suicide strategy in the UK has engaged with wealth inequality directly. In fact, other than in Scotland, national suicide strategies have far more work to do to even acknowledge, let alone address, the role of economic inequalities as a contributor to the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviour. Instead, they put forward various, somewhat artificial, measures to manage suicide risk. These include increasing access to training for employers and public services (e.g. the DWP) to spot the signs of suicidality, increasing surveillance of suicide rates, and identifying ways to support ‘at risk groups’. However, the deep, systemic socio-economic and political inequalities that exacerbate those risks are not mentioned at all. Our current suicide prevention approach is more an exercise in suicide management, doing little to tackle the underlying forces that undermine people’s quality of life and increase the risk of suicide.

In partnership with the Discovering Liveability project team based at the University of Edinburgh, University of Lincoln, and Mind in Camden, we brought together a group of experts from public health, economics, sociology, and psychology to discuss the relationship between wealth inequality, suicide and liveability. Our new report, Unliveable: How extreme wealth inequality contributes to the risk of suicide, discusses the evidence on the effects of wealth on suicide risk. To guide our research, we use the Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) model of suicidal behaviour to examine the effects of wealth inequality on each stage of the model.

Through both our roundtable discussion and wider literature review, we find evidence of wealth inequalities impacting each stage of the model:

Pre-motivational phase (background factors)

• People who lack wealth are more likely to be exposed to stress trauma and adverse experiences

• Wealth inequality is linked to differences in housing and to worse mental and physical health outcomes

• Wealth inequality increases levels of insecurity, precarity and deprivation - all factors that increase vulnerability

Motivational phase (ideation / intention formation)

• Wealth inequality can trigger feelings of defeat, entrapment and humiliation - all known risk factors

• Wealth inequality increases status competition, fuelling social perfectionism and the risk of failing to meet expectations

• Not owning a home is linked to a higher prevalence of emotional and behavioural issues within families

Volitional phase (behavioural enaction)

• People living in deprived areas are likely to be more exposed to suicides (a risk factor for suicidal attempts)

• Wealth inequality undermines attempts to regulate big tech to reduce exposure to suicidal content

• Mainstream media outlets owned by wealthy individuals promote harmful narratives about the ‘undeserving poor’ etc

We call upon the government to consider the following three recommendations to break the link between suicide and wealth inequality:

• A review of existing suicide prevention strategies to ensure that the link between socio-economic inequalities, including wealth inequality, and suicide is explicitly addressed

• Action to reduce extreme levels of wealth inequality and to mitigate its spillover impacts (including on mental health)

• Greater acknowledgement of the myth of meritocracy on the part of a range of political and civic society actors