A new policy brief from the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR) at King’s College London summarises the findings and recommendations resulting from a mixed methods PhD investigation which explored self-harm and suicidal behaviours in the UK Armed Forces.
About the PhD
Over three years (2022-2025), this mixed methods PhD investigated self-harm and suicidal behaviours in the UK Armed Forces across three sub-studies:
- A systematic review on the risk and protective factors associated with self-harm, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and death by suicide among serving and ex-serving personnel of the UK Armed Forces, Canadian Armed Forces, Australian Defence Force and New Zealand Defence Force (28 papers).
- A secondary data analysis using data from Phase 3 (2014-2016) and Phase 4 (2022-2023) of the KCMHR health and wellbeing cohort study to explore the rates of, factors associated with, and timing of, lifetime self-harm, lifetime suicidal thoughts and lifetime suicide attempts among serving and ex-serving personnel (approximately 4,000 participants).
- Qualitative semi-structured interviews with a subsample of UK ex-serving personnel who endorsed self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and/or suicide attempts in Phase 4 of the cohort study to explore their experiences of seeking help for these behaviours (15 participants).
The KCMHR health and wellbeing cohort study is a large-scale, longitudinal cohort study investigating the long-term health and wellbeing of the UK Armed Forces. The cohort study has examined the impacts of deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan across four phases of data collection over the last 20 years.
You can read about the findings from Phase 4 of the cohort study here.
