School performance and gender differences in suicidal behaviour – a 30-year follow-up of a Stockholm cohort born in 1953

Abstract

Astonishingly little is known about the relationship between high educational achievements and suicidal behaviour among women. This is remarkable given that a woman breaking into traditionally male-dominant spheres is a well established example of social-role marginality. The current study combines fatal and non-fatal suicidal behaviour and analyses, by means of logistic regression, the degree to which high school performance during pre-adolescence in the mid-1960s, in Sweden, had a detrimental effect on suicidal behaviour for women, as opposed to men, in adolescence and young adulthood. The Stockholm birth cohort study was used for this purpose. The results show that girls with both above and below average marks had an elevated risk of engaging in suicidal behaviour. However, this relation only held for girls who had grown up with supportive parental ambitions in terms of educational commitment. For boys, only low school performance was shown to be suicidogenic, irrespective of parental ambitions.

Keywords:

• suicide
• suicide attempt
• gender constraints
• school grades
• family ambitions
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

This research was financed by the Swedish Research Council. I wish to thank Sten-Åke Stenberg, SOFI, and Ilkka Henrik Mäkinen, SCOHOST, for commenting on an earlier version of the manuscript. I also thank the reviewers and the participants' of the 16th Annual Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference for helpful comments, especially the discussant Alexander Miething, CHESS.