NASP awarded SEK 3.7 million for research on youth suicidality
Ulrika Lögdberg at the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention (NASP) at Karolinska Institutet has been granted funding from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte) amounting to SEK 3,746,000, to be used for a three-year research project aimed at understanding suicidality among young people.
In Sweden, suicide rates have declined across all age groups over the past 20 years, except among those under 25. Despite extensive research, the question remains: why do young people take their own lives?
To develop effective suicide prevention strategies, we need deeper insight into young people’s everyday lives, their thoughts, feelings and struggles. Filling these critical knowledge gaps is essential for creating interventions that reflect young people’s experiences and ultimately save lives.
A model based on young people’s perspectives
The aim of the research project is to gain a deeper understanding of the complex reality that often surrounds a young person’s suicide or suicidality. By approaching the subject from multiple angles, both through young people who have made serious suicide attempts and by examining the circumstances surrounding young people who have died by suicide via those close to them, such as friends, family members, teachers, professionals, and also through social media, the project seeks to shed light on how suicidal processes develop and are perceived depending on social context and relationships.
“We want to understand how suicidal processes take shape in young people’s lives and how their social environment influences them. This is knowledge that is currently lacking,” says project leader and postdoctoral researcher Ulrika Lögdberg at NASP and the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME).
The goal is for the knowledge generated to support the development of a suicide-preventive intervention model grounded in young people’s experiences. Such a model could help shape social policy and improve healthcare and support services for youth. Ultimately, the hope is that it will also guide and strengthen future suicide prevention efforts across healthcare, schools and other areas of society.
Unique combination of methods for data collection
What makes the project particularly unique is its combination of methods, merging event analysis techniques, commonly used in suicide investigations, with a qualitative and ethnographic approach, which remains rare in suicide research. The ethnographic method means that the research evolves as new knowledge emerges, enabling close engagement with the empirical data.
“In practice, this means that researchers follow the young people and their surroundings in a responsive way, where data collection is shaped by their stories, experiences and context, with the aim of creating greater understanding and identifying factors that influence suicidal trajectories,” says Ulrika Lögdberg.
The project is scheduled to run from 2026 to 2028.