New research finds that people are far more likely to report suicidal ideation when they perceive their life to be getting worse relative to their own recent past, rather than because of their income, age or health status alone.
South Korea has the highest suicide rate among developed nations. The UK study, recently published in Risk Analysis, used annual observations spanning 2018 to 2023 from the Korean Welfare Panel Study (KoWePS), which is distributed by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs and Seoul National University and tracks socioeconomic and mental health factors, researchers analyzed responses from 14,552 individuals. Each individual’s self-reported life satisfaction (measured on a 0–10 “ladder of life”) was tracked and interpreted using the Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT), which holds that people judge outcomes as gains or losses against a personal reference point and feel losses more intensely than equal gains.
Key findings:
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Individuals whose self-reported wellbeing had declined from the prior year were more than twice as likely to report suicidal ideation as those whose wellbeing had improved or stayed the same (3.02% vs. 1.41%).
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How strongly a person reacts to setbacks was the strongest individual predictor of suicide risk. Individuals with the highest loss aversion had suicidal ideation rates over 12 times higher than those with the lowest.
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A person’s positive outlook on the future mattered only when combined with how sharply they reacted to recent losses – the belief alone was not a meaningful predictor.
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Young women emerged as the demographic group most sensitive to declining wellbeing, showing the largest reduction in ideation risk when circumstances improved.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, suicidal ideation rates in the sample declined even as average wellbeing fell — a pattern the authors attribute to a shared, society-wide sense of hardship that may have softened individual feelings of personal loss.
These results suggest that trajectory matters more than a single snapshot of someone’s life. Two people with identical income and health can face very different psychological risks depending on which direction their life feels like it’s heading, and how strongly they experience that change as a loss.”
Mamata Parhi, Professor
The findings point toward a shift in how suicide-prevention screening might work from monitoring static risk factors like income or diagnosis alone toward tracking recent changes in a person’s self-reported wellbeing and their sensitivity to setbacks. The authors suggest that behavioral markers of loss aversion could help flag at-risk individuals before ideation escalates.
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