Guest blog, Anita Sangha – The Fairness Foundation
Last year, in partnership with the Discovering Liveability project team, The Fairness Foundation brought together a group of experts from public health, economics, sociology, and psychology to discuss the relationship between wealth inequality, suicide and liveability.
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. In partnership with the Discovering Livability team, the Fairness Foundation set out to explore whether wealth inequality is contributing to the rise in suicides.
This exploration aimed to extend previous research on the relationship between socio-economic inequalities and deprivation to the increased risk of suicide. Housing insecurity, unemployment, insecure work, income inequality, income deprivation; economic uncertainty; debt; area-level deprivation, and more have all been connected to increased risk of suicidal ideation and behaviour. However, specific research on wealth and suicide is lacking.
We argue that this gap needs to be addressed. As the Fairness Foundation has demonstrated in its recent 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 life occurs.
Unsurprisingly, no national suicide strategy in the UK has engaged with wealth inequality directly. In fact, other than Scotland, national suicide strategies have far more work to do to even acknowledge and address the role of economic inequality as a contributor to the risk of suicidality. The Discovering Liveability team are exploring this issue as part of their ongoing research on suicide prevention policies and previous project Suicide In/As Politics which asks how socio-economic and political contexts might also play a role in suicide prevention.
Our report, Unliveable Inequality: How Wealth Gaps Shape Suicide in the UK, discusses the evidence on the effects of wealth on suicide risk. In light of our findings, 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 inequalities, and suicide is explicitly addressed.
- Action to reduce extreme levels of wealth inequality, through a combination of pre- and redistributive measures.
- Greater acknowledgement of the myth of meritocracy on the part of a range of political and civic society actors, and increased collaboration between wealth inequality campaigners and policy researchers on suicide prevention.
Anita Sangha is an MSc Psychology student at the University of Exeter. She was a Research Assistant at the Fairness Foundation and holds an MSc Social Cognition. If you have any questions about this research, please contact anita@fairnessfoundation.com
You can read further publications by The Fairness Foundation here.
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. There is further support information here as well.
