Special Interest Group in Self-Harm and Suicide

The group is led by Dr Alexandra Pitman, Dr Sarah Rowe, Dr Gemma Lewis, and our ECR leads are Bijaya Biswal and Lianne Dhalla.

The Special Interest Group (SIG) in Self-Harm and Suicide is an interdisciplinary group of UCL researchers and clinicians from our partner NHS Trusts conducting clinical and public health research on self-harm, suicide attempt and suicide.

Our aim is to improve the understanding of the motivations, risk factors, treatments and prevention of self-harm, suicide attempt and suicide. The SIG has been established to strengthen capacity and collaboration across UCL in research into this area. We feel that every academic discipline has something to contribute to observational and interventional research on self-harm and suicide. We are keen to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations in this field, and to encourage conceptual work that synthesises perspectives and contributions from diverse disciplines. We hope that with collaborators across UCL, across the UK and internationally, including those with lived experience, this will contribute to reducing the distress associated with self-harm and suicidality and reducing suicide rates.

The SIG provides a forum for academics, clinicians and people with lived experience across UCL to share knowledge and experience of different methodological approaches to the study of self-harm and suicide and to increase collaboration through regular seminar events and other activities.

Our current objectives are:

• To enhance opportunities for collaboration between UCL researchers and clinicians in the partner NHS trusts.
• To support dissemination of self-harm and suicide research findings across UCL.
• To encourage early career researchers (ECRs) into this research field, both within UCL and beyond.
• To promote and model interdisciplinarity in self-harm and suicide research at UCL.
• To promote and model co-production of self-harm and suicide research at UCL.

If you are a UCL researcher and/or clinicians from our partner NHS Trusts interested in clinical and public health research on self-harm, suicide attempt and suicide, please register your interest in joining the SIG by entering your details at this link.

Events

Since our inception in 2023 we have held the following seminars:

11 October 2023 – SIG launch event

• Elisha Joshi (University of Bristol): Systematic review of studies describing the prevalence of self-harm in South Asia
• Miriam Nyawira (UCL): Approaches to suicide means restriction in rural Kenya
• Dr Sarah Rowe (UCL): A co-produced definition and classification of harm minimisation for self-harm 

20 March 2024 - ECR Research Showcase

• Andrea Vaughan (UCL IoE): A corpus-based investigation to identify linguistic features of suicidal ideation in unthematic content on reddit.
• Dr Talen Wright (UCL) Mental distress in transgender people; a study of prevalence and determinants.  

22 May 2024: Investigating risk of suicide in patients with cancer using routine data

• Dr Neethu Mohan, State Health Agency, Kerala, India
• Dr Alexandra Pitman, UCL
• Dr Katherine Thackray (nee Henson), NCRAS (NHS England)
• Dr Justin Yang, UCL

This event was supported by the UCL Global Engagement Fund and was organised by the UCL Institute of Mental Health in collaboration with The GRID Council, India. All resources are on this site.

27 August 2024 – guest speaker 

Professor Jane Pirkis (University of Melbourne): Using the media as a force for good in suicide prevention

8 October 2024 – guest speaker

Professor Olivia Kirtley (KU Leuven): Experience sampling methodology in mental health research 

12 December 2024 – research presentations 

Click this link to watch the Zoom recording. Passcode: X80%v#F&

• Dr Shira Barzilay (University of Haifa): Monitoring smartphone data for suicide risk detection
• Lianne Dhalla (UCL): Can repetitive self-harm be conceptualised as an addictive behaviour? A systematic review

5 June 2025 – guest speaker

• Professor Matt Spittal (University of Melbourne): Predicting suicidal behaviour using machine learning algorithms: are we getting better at predicting rare events?

2 July 2025 – research presentations 

• Dr Cemile Ceren Sönmez (UCL): Bridging the Evidence Gap: Suicide risk assessment for youth in low-resource settings
• Yanakan Logeswaran (UCL/KCL): Risk of self-harm and suicide on reaching the age at which a parent died by suicide or other causes: a Danish population-based self-controlled case series study

3 December 2025: LGBTQ+ suicide and self-harm research

This event was held jointly with the UCL Division of Psychiatry LGBTQ+ EDI group.

• Dr Heather Santos (Temple University; Drexel University): Intersectional Perspectives of Suicide Risk among Transgender Adults in Canada
• Dr Hazel Marzetti (University of Edinburgh): What constitutes a crisis? Mapping provisions of LGBTQ+ suicide prevention in the UK

11 March 2026: Suicide and Stigma

• Ahsan Mashhood (University of Oxford): Sociocultural perceptions of suicide in Pakistan: A systematic review & qualitative evidence synthesis
• Dr Bijayalaxmi Biswal (UCL): “Man up, work through it”: a qualitative study on suicidal distress and help-seeking among men aged 40-65 years

Contact us

If you would like to become a member of the Self-Harm and Suicide SIG, please complete this form. You can contact the SIG via shproject@ucl.ac.uk 

Resources

• A Systematic Review of Perceived Risks and Risk Management Strategies in Non-Suicidal Self-Harm (2025)
• Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of ECT in reducing suicidal ideation, self-harm, suicide, and mortality (2025)
• Views of Suicide-Bereaved Adults Regarding the Significance of the Deceased’s Death Date (2025)
• Development of the PRINTQUAL-web tool for assessing the quality of online news reporting of suicide: adaptation of the PRINTQUAL tool for newspaper reporting (2025)
• Spatio-temporal trends and socio-environmental determinants of suicides in England from 2002 - 2022: an ecological population-based study (2025)
• The influence of peer non-suicidal self-harm on young adults’ urges to self-harm: experimental study (2023)
• Proportion of suicides in Denmark attributable to bereavement by the suicide of a first-degree relative or partner: Nested case–control study (2022)
• Harm minimisation for self-harm: a cross-sectional survey of British clinicians’ perspectives and practices (2022)
• Effectiveness, acceptability and potential harms of peer support for self-harm in non-clinical settings: systematic review (2022)
• Low intensity treatments for self-harm or suicidal behaviour: what’s the harm in trying? (2022)
• Depression and self-harm from adolescence to young adulthood in sexual minorities compared with heterosexuals in the UK: a population-based cohort study (2018) 

Support Sources

If you are a researcher conducting a study on self-harm or suicide and would like to direct study participants to sources of support, you can use this link to support sources created by this SIG.

If you are interested in gaining Suicide prevention training please click on the following link: Suicide Prevention Training | UCL Workplace Health