James Wiley

The COVID natural experiment suggests something very different. Suicide rates increase with declining death rates coming out of the flu season. When death rates are disrupted, suicide rates are also disrupted:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Higher suicide rates often coincide with longer life expectancy. On their own, they are not necessarily a sign of societal decline. For instance, the drop in suicide rates during COVID does not imply that the pandemic was a time of joy or prosperity.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The NYT article is well balanced. Even researchers who examine the sensitive issue of direct causation in suicide would find too little here to justify placing blame on any single factor. It’s an interesting case, but I don’t expect the lawsuit to be successful.

(PDF) Why do suicide rates increase in the spring and decrease in the fall? Insights from an empirical evaluation of Stengel's social hypothesis on suicide PDF | In 1952, the psychiatrist Erwin Stengel hypothesized that suicide becomes rarer in times when the value of life within a society is lower, when... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

While PsyArXiv is going through some growing pains, you can find the most up-to-date version of the preprint here:
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Imagine the IRL version of this. AI body cam on a SWAT officer assesses threat level of a target in a split second and has the officer kill the target before the officer could ever react.
youtu.be/9alJwQG-Wbk?...

You’re Not Weak — You’re Wired to Feel This Way “If every suicidal thought was a small death, how many lives have we already lost — quietly, invisibly, inside our own minds?”

taqiyyazayla.medium.com/youre-not-we...

To be fair, the type of content generated by LLMs also plays a role 😛

bsky.app/profile/jame...

The problem may be worse than it looks. Higher mortality rates suppress suicide rates—likely because deaths from other causes preclude later suicides. Rural areas have higher mortality. So how much higher are suicide rates there, after adjusting for this?

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🌟New publication!🌟

Feasibility and Acceptability of a Brief Intervention for Youth Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Pediatric Primary Care Providers

It was great to be part of the team on this project. I’m excited about continuing this work! @cmpinciotti.bsky.social

#suicideprevention

Almost exactly one year after starting my lab (!), I'm thrilled to share our first preprint! 🥳 @leilyb.bsky.social @sharinahamm.bsky.social @francesghart.bsky.social

We propose future directions for mathematical, computational, & digital methods to advance suicide research: osf.io/preprints/ps...

The recommended prompts it gave were also gold:

I wonder what they’re suggesting here? ☹

The model seems to be overtrained on erratic online discourse 🤔

I totally broke a ChatGPT guardrail today:

A new piece in @psypost.bsky.social on our recent study published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. Check it out!

This feels a bit like when your child does something amazing and you feel like you want to take the credit but can't really. My new book Alchemy: An Illustrated History has arrived, and it looks *gorgeous*.

Bird feeders have caused a dramatic evolution of California hummingbirds Beaks have grown longer and larger, and ranges have expanded to follow the feeders

This is amazing. 🪶
www.science.org/content/arti...

It’s kinda wild how psychologists will just keep developing “paradigms” targeting estimands that are less and less plausibly empirically identified, because somehow that’s the epitome of rigorous theorizing (tm)

Can I list Coffee as a co-author?

7/7 In conclusion, accounting for death rates may be necessary before interpreting fluctuations in suicide rates.

Higher temperatures increase suicide rates in the United States and Mexico - Nature Climate Change A 1 °C increase in monthly average temperature is associated with higher suicide rates in the United States and Mexico. Combined with comparable analysis of depressive language in US Twitter updates, ...

6/7 Why care? Consider previous research suggests increasing temperatures drive suicides. I show that time-of-year (proxy for temperature) is not causal of suicide—rather, death rates (which are higher in winter months) drive suicide.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

5/7 I offer an alternative interpretation to Stengel’s theory: that each non-suicide-related death removes a potential suicide from the population. Thus the death rate censors the suicide rate.

4/7 I then test whether the pre-pandemic correlation between death rates and suicide rates can predict the 2020 suicide rates. Results are good:

3/7 In 2020, the seasonal pattern for death rates was disrupted due to inordinate deaths occurring at an atypical time of year. Suicide rates show an exact inverse break in their seasonality relative to death rates. Is this just a coincidence? 🤔

2/7 The analysis reveals a consistent inverse seasonal relationship between death rates and suicide rates.

1/7 PREPRINT UPDATE – I’ve overhauled my paper looking at correlations between suicide rates and death rates, examining Stengel’s theory that suicide becomes rarer when the value of life within a society diminishes, when death is common. #suicidology
osf.io/preprints/ps...

A multi-model relationship detection method to assist with naïve exploration of high-dimensional data: Wiley, James Christopher; English, Simon; Church, Kinsey; Ward, Richard A; Flowers, James; Chamoun, Céline

Suicide Cultures and the Sociology of Suicide, University of Edinburgh 6-7th May 2025

blogs.ed.ac.uk/suicide-cult...

Sociologically inclined + working on suicide? You can apply to hang out with @annamueller.bsky.social + @sethabrutyn.bsky.social and the #suicidecultures team for 2 days

Mapping Injury, Overdose, and Violence Dashboard Explore local, state, and national data on deaths from drug overdose, suicide, and homicide.

On January 14, 2025, the CDC released an easy to use dashboard for mapping injury, overdose and violent death (homicide, suicide), in the USA. You can sort by state, county, census tract. GREAT RESOURCE for local grants! Hope new admin doesn't shut it down. Please share. #SuicidePrevention #SWTech

Suicide risk is double in people with chronic pain. What can be done to reduce this risk?

In our EJP paper, we found mental defeat a significant predictor of future suicide risk in people with chronic pain
🧪Open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...