Background With more than 700,000 suicides occurring each year worldwide, males represent more than double the number of females within this statistic. There is an abundance of literature surrounding male suicide risk associated with indicators of social position, including labour market status, occupational class, education, income and marital status. This systematic review, approved by PROSPERO in 2023, aims to draw together existing evidence on suicide mortality and suicide risk associated with socioeconomic status (SES) and occupational standing so that to enhance our understanding on this issue and for strategies to reduce suicides in men.
Method Electronic bibliographic databases MEDLINE, PsycINFO, EMBASE, Scopus and Web of Science are used to search for case-control, cohort and cross-sectional studies using a systematic literature search strategy. Variables of focus include marital status, income level, educational attainment, employment status and type of occupation. Quality of the included studies is evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Statistics are reported as prevalence, odd ratios, risk ratios, relative risks, hazard ratios or standardised mortality ratios.
Results The search of databases acknowledged 25,177 records. Duplicate removal and inclusion criteria for title screening was then implemented (2597 records remaining). Upon completion of abstract screening, 446 studies remained for full text examination, and 78 studies were finally considered to be fully eligible for the meta-analysis. At the present time, we are in the process of extracting the data from these studies, and expect to be able to present the results of pooled analyses at the conference.
Conclusion We believe that results of this study will contribute to the growing literature and assist in unravelling the underlying mechanisms contributing to the risk for suicide in men and thus inform strategies to reduce suicide mortality in this population.