Suicide is a cause of death that haunts the living in perpetuity. After a suicide event, those left behind are tormented by questions. "Could I have done something?" "What did I miss?" "How could this happen?" "Was it my fault?" Even the best answers fail to return the person lost, and natural grief is often compounded with unnecessary blame.

Discussions about suicide prediction and prevention primarily focus on known risk factors such as mental illness and suicidal ideation.1 In comparison, far less attention is paid to another common contributor to suicide present among a staggering 24.3 percent of the adult U.S. population.2 That makes this risk factor as prevalent as clinical depression, yet far more likely to be overlooked due to suicide stereotypes.

This unheralded suicide risk factor is chronic pain.3 In this post, we'll dive into three specific ways that chronic pain increases suicide risk, practical signs by which to recognize the patterns, and general strategies to help.

More than perhaps any other medical condition, chronic pain poisons the emotional well of what it means to be human. Although people differ in countless ways, our similarities are even more striking. Across time and cultures, for example, people universally share fundamental needs for meaning, interpersonal connection, safety, contribution, personal growth, and adventure, as articulated famously in psychological theories such as Maslow's hierarchy.4

Many medical conditions compromise our ability to fulfill these fundamental human needs. Emotional struggles and mental health conditions are often a result of a medical condition impairing a person's ability to function in an important human need domain. Yet what makes chronic pain uniquely psychologically damaging (see Figure below) is that it doesn't impact just a single human need. Chronic pain jeopardizes all of them.

As a psychologist........

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