Exposure to Community Violence Linked to Higher Suicide Risk, UMD Study Shows

Editor's Note: The following content references suicide and may be distressing to some readers. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and talk to a trained crisis specialist 24/7.

One morning in 2008, 22-year-old Mónica Caudillo was munching on a hotel breakfast before a friend’s wedding when her father yelled to her family: Get down! Outside, a gunman in a van was speeding down the street as if pursuing a target, prompting the Caudillos to crawl into a bathroom while automatic gunfire crackled in the distance.

Threats of danger weren’t uncommon for her family and others in Mexico during Caudillo’s youth, after the government in 2006 launched a war on drug cartels that resulted in an explosion of murders and kidnappings in once-peaceful cities, with many of the crimes carried out in highly public manners meant to send a message. Her hometown of Torreón in north-central Mexico “suddenly became like an armed combat zone,” she said.

Now a University of Maryland associate professor of sociology, Caudillo studies the impact of “community violence”—violent events that occur in the geographical area, including mass violence—on local residents. In a new paper, she reveals a particularly troubling consequence: suicide.

Killing oneself is a plausible direct result of exposure to bloodshed, in contrast to the traditional theory that homicides and suicides are triggered by common causes like gun access or poverty, according to the study published last month in Population and Development Review and culling data from all of Mexico’s nearly 2,500 municipalities. Caudillo links more than 2,100 suicides that occurred in the first 14 years of the ongoing drug war to exposure to community violence.

“A lot of people experience suicide ideation, but very few actually commit suicide, and there has been very little understanding of that bridge,” she said. “These findings might help explain what can push some people over the edge.”

In the United States, where suicides surged 30% between 2000 and 2020, Caudillo’s findings serve as a call for communities to increase supports following mass-casualty events like school shootings, she said. 

The connection appeared to play out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where in 2018 a gunman killed 17 students, teachers and staff and injured another 17. The following year, two student witnesses killed themselves within the same week. One had wrestled with survivor’s guilt, her mother told reporters. Two years later, a third former student took his own life, followed by a fourth last year. In that case, the victim grew withdrawn after the shooting and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, his family said in a social media post.

Suicidal ideation is often caused by pain and hopelessness, but many follow through when they feel deep uncertainty about the future, not unlike the aftermath of a stock market crash, Caudillo said.

“When gruesome and terrifying events happen and you don’t know when the cavalry will come, when there’s no guarantee it will never happen again, that’s a particular type of hopelessness,” she said.

Such fears can overwhelm survivors of school shootings, according to Rebecca Jarquin, director of Eagles’ Haven, a Florida nonprofit wellness center established after the Parkland shootings. It opened its doors two months earlier than planned in response to the back-to-back suicides in 2019 and still treats survivors, some of whom have experienced additional mass shootings. 

“Our brain loves certainty,” Jarquin said. “We love to know what's going to happen because it makes us feel safe. And when there is no certainty that you won’t die, the anxiety is crippling.”

Because Caudillo’s data came from Mexico, where cartel violence remains a looming presence, her findings don’t fully translate to the United States, she noted. Suicides in her study typically occurred three to six months after exposure to violence, whereas the Parkland suicides took place a year or more later.

Still, she said, “school shootings are probably the closest thing I can think of to random. If kids are feeling it can happen at any time, at any moment, that’s the definition of uncertainty.”

While most suicides in the U.S. are by firearm, suicides in Mexico—where civilian gun ownership is rare outside of criminal organizations—overwhelmingly occur by hanging, reinforcing Caudillo’s conclusion that suicides can be a result of exposure to homicides, rather than the result of a common cause like gun access, she said.  

Caudillo’s traumatic memories of her formative years still cause nightmares and led her to take long breaks during her data analysis. One mass shooting broke out blocks from her house, and another in a restaurant as she waited for a bus nearby left 20 dead. 

But her experiences also sparked a professional appetite to measure how people adapt to dangerous surroundings. Practically, that often means new friendships, social destinations, routines and even wardrobes; philosophically it begs questions of mortality, resiliency and trust, she said.

The findings in her latest study drive home a reality she knows all too well, having lost an acquaintance in Mexico to suicide. 

“There are very vulnerable populations among us, including people who have already been experiencing suicide ideation, and we need to be taking care of them,” she said.