Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Suicide claims over 700,000 lives annually and remains a leading cause of premature mortality worldwide. Despite decades of research into its psychological, social, and environmental risk factors, global suicide rates have shown little sustained decline. This persistence underscores the urgent need to identify additional modifiable, upstream targets for prevention and intervention. Recently, nutrition has emerged as one such candidate. Diet and metabolic health have been increasingly linked to the development and course of various psychiatric conditions, including depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, yet their relationship to suicide risk remains comparatively understudied. Nonetheless, a small but growing number of cohort and population-based studies have begun linking healthier dietary patterns to lower suicide-related outcomes, with further evidence suggesting possible dose-dependent associations between specific micronutrients and suicidality. Although causal evidence remains limited, these epidemiological signals are supported by several convergent biological mechanisms, including systemic inflammation, oxidative stress, disrupted neuroplasticity, and gut-brain dysregulation. Critically, these mechanisms readily map onto the affective, cognitive, and interpersonal constructs central to contemporary ideation-to-action models of suicide, lending support to the incorporation of nutritional status into existing frameworks. Taken together, this convergence argues that diet and nutrition should be recognized as modifiable, scalable, and biologically grounded targets for suicide prevention, and underscores the need for future randomized dietary intervention trials, routine nutritional screening in psychiatric care, and evaluation of food policy as an upstream prevention strategy.
Authors: Mihai Bendea, Gabriel R. Fries
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,630
OpenAlex ID: W7223983278