Question: @Laura. how does exploring suicide and aggression help/improve society and are people born with suicidal thought

Laura Hemming answered on 24 Jun 2018:

So my research is looking at suicide and aggression in a particular population – male prisoners. Hopefully our research will find a link between how somebody deals with their emotions and their tendency to experience suicidal or aggressive thoughts and behaviours. If we do find this, then we hope to develop an intervention for prisoners which will help them to deal with their emotions in better ways. So this research will help mainly in the following ways:
1) Prisoners – will reduce their likelihood of death by suicide or aggression
2) Prison staff – will help reduce their workload so that they can focus on more positive aspects of prison life for instance introducing more education or work for prisoners
3) Family / friends of prisoners – will reduce likelihood that they will be bereaved by suicide which can cause significant mental health problems and also makes somebody more likely to attempt suicide themselves
4) General public – will be saved money. The average prisoner suicide costs the taxpayer between 1.7 and 3.2 million pounds

To answer the second question, there isn’t much evidence that people are born with suicidal thoughts. Instead, it is more likely that a range of risk factors in a person’s life lead somebody to become suicidal. These can include things that are biological, such as genetics, things that are psychological such as trauma, and things that are environmental such as social isolation.