Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them

A rare study that transforms our understanding of why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them

Youth suicide clusters have deeply unsettled communities in recent years. While clusters have been widely documented in the media, too little is known about why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them both.

In Life under Pressure, Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn investigate the social roots of youth suicide and why certain places weather disproportionate incidents of adolescent suicides and suicide clusters. Through close examination of kids' lives in a community repeatedly rocked by youth suicide clusters, Mueller and Abrutyn reveal how the social worlds that youth inhabit and the various messages they learn in those spaces--about who they are supposed to be, mental illness, and help-seeking--shape their feelings about themselves and in turn their risk of suicide. With great empathy, Mueller and Abrutyn also identify the moments when adults unintentionally fail kids by not talking to them about suicide, teaching them how to seek help, or helping them grieve.

Through stories of survival, resilience, and even rebellion, Mueller and Abrutyn show how social environments can cause suicide and how they can be changed to help kids discover a life worth living. By revealing what it is like to live and die in one community, Life under Pressure offers tangible solutions to one of the twenty-first century's most tragic public health problems.

Anna S. Mueller is Luther Dana Waterman Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a leading expert on youth suicide and suicide prevention in schools, and her work has helped families, schools, and communities understand how social environments generate risk of suicide and why youth suicide clusters emerge and persist. Her work on youth suicide has received numerous awards for its contributions to knowledge, including the Edwin Shneidman Early Career Award from the American Association of Suicidology. In 2020, she was named one of Science News's "Top 10 Early Career Scientists to Watch."

Seth Abrutyn is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn specializes in youth suicide and is also a general sociologist whose research rests at the intersection of mental health, emotions, social psychology, and culture, and which has won several national awards. His overarching goals as a social scientist are to merge sociological theory with the public imagination in hopes of making accessible sociological tools in the service of solving social problems.