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Does country of resettlement influence the risk of suicide in refugees? A case-control study in Sweden and Norway

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2022

R. Amin ,
E. Mittendorfer-Rutz ,
L. Mehlum ,
B. Runeson ,
M. Helgesson ,
P. Tinghög ,
E. Björkenstam ,
E. Holmes  and
P. Qin
R. Amin*
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet, Clinical Neuroscience, solna, Sweden
E. Mittendorfer-Rutz
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet, Clinical Neuroscience, solna, Sweden
L. Mehlum
Affiliation:
University of Oslo, National Centre For Suicide Research And Prevention, Oslo, Norway
B. Runeson
Affiliation:
University of Oslo, National Centre For Suicide Research And Prevention, solna, Sweden
M. Helgesson
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet, Clinical Neuroscience, solna, Sweden
P. Tinghög
Affiliation:
Swedish Red Cross University College, Health Sciences, Huddinge, Sweden
E. Björkenstam
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet, Clinical Neuroscience, solna, Sweden
E. Holmes
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet, Division Of Psychology, Department Of Clinical Neuroscience, solna, Sweden
P. Qin
Affiliation:
University of Oslo, National Centre For Suicide Research And Prevention, Oslo, Norway
*
*Corresponding author.

Abstract

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Introduction

Little is known regarding how the risk of suicide in refugees relates to their host country. Specifically, to what extent, inter-country differences in structural factors between the host countries may explain the association between refugee status and subsequent suicide is lacking in previous literature.

Objectives

We aimed to investigate the risk of suicide among refugees in Sweden and Norway according to their sex, age, region/country of birth and duration of residence.

Methods

Each suicide case between the age of 18-64 years during 1998 and 2018 (17,572 and 9,443 cases in Sweden and Norway, respectively) was matched with up to 20 population-based controls, by sex and age. Multivariate-adjusted conditional logistic regression models yielding adjusted odds ratios (aORs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were used to test the association between refugee status and suicide.

Results

The aORs for suicide in refugees in Sweden and Norway were 0.5 (95% CI: 0.5-0.6) and 0.3 (95% CI: 0.3-0.4), compared with the Swedish-born and Norwegian-born individuals, respectively. Stratification by region/country of birth showed similar statistically significant lower odds for most refugee groups in both host countries except for refugees from Eritrea (aOR 1.0, 95% CI: 0.7-1.6) in Sweden. The risk of suicide did not vary much across refugee groups by their duration of residence, sex and age.

Conclusions

The findings of almost similar suicide mortality advantages among refugees in two host countries may suggest that resiliency and culture/religion-bound attitudes could be more influential for suicide risk among refugees than other post-migration environmental and structural factors in the host country.

Disclosure

No significant relationships.

Keywords

SuicideCountry of birthDuration of residenceRefugee
Type
Abstract
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 65 , Special Issue S1: Abstracts of the 30th European Congress of Psychiatry , June 2022 , pp. S122
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Psychiatric Association
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