Beyond Risk: Protective Mechanisms for Youth Suicide in Rural Communities
Tracks
Monarch
| Friday, November 6, 2026 |
| 11:05 AM - 11:25 AM |
Overview
Laura Hemming, La Trobe University
Three Key Learnings
1. Protection against suicide operates through interacting mechanisms across individual, relational, and environmental levels, not isolated factors.
2. Connectedness is foundational but only protective when supported by adaptive skills and safe, enabling environments
3. Effective rural suicide prevention requires co-ordinated, place-based systems that align community, services and policy to sustain protective environments over time.
Presenter
Dr Laura Hemming
Senior Research Fellow
La Trobe University
Beyond Risk: Protective Mechanisms for Youth Suicide in Rural Communities
Presentation Overview
Suicide rates in young people who live rurally are increasing. Traditional approaches to suicide prevention have focused largely on identifying and reducing risk, yet risk factors alone poorly predict suicidal behaviour and offer limited guidance. This is particularly true for young people living in rural communities where overlapping stressors and limited access to support mean risk-focused approaches offer little guidance for effective prevention. This presentation reports findings from an umbrella review examining what protects young people from suicide, with a focus on implications for rural mental health.
We synthesised 49 reviews encompassing 506 primary studies on protective factors for suicide-related outcomes among young people aged 10–24. Through a process of re-coding and conceptual synthesis, 57 protective factors were distilled into six key mechanisms: connectedness and belonging, emotion regulation, cognitive appraisal & meaning-making, adaptive capacity, behavioural engagement & routine, and environmental safety.
Rather than operating independently, these mechanisms interact across three layers: intrapersonal, interpersonal and environmental. Connectedness emerged as the central organising mechanism, enabling help-seeking and buffering distress, but only when supported by safe environments and individual capacity to respond to adversity.
These findings have particular relevance for rural contexts. While rural communities may offer strong opportunities for belonging, these can be undermined by stigma, limited service access, environmental instability and reduced anonymity. In this sense, protective processes are therefore contingent on local context and conditions.
The findings suggest that effective suicide prevention requires a shift towards integrated, multi-level approaches that strengthen connection, build coping and adaptive skills, and improve environmental safety and system-level supports. Interventions targeting a single domain are unlikely to be sufficient. This presentation will support attendees to identify gaps in current approaches and apply these mechanisms to strengthen community, service, and system responses in their own contexts.
We synthesised 49 reviews encompassing 506 primary studies on protective factors for suicide-related outcomes among young people aged 10–24. Through a process of re-coding and conceptual synthesis, 57 protective factors were distilled into six key mechanisms: connectedness and belonging, emotion regulation, cognitive appraisal & meaning-making, adaptive capacity, behavioural engagement & routine, and environmental safety.
Rather than operating independently, these mechanisms interact across three layers: intrapersonal, interpersonal and environmental. Connectedness emerged as the central organising mechanism, enabling help-seeking and buffering distress, but only when supported by safe environments and individual capacity to respond to adversity.
These findings have particular relevance for rural contexts. While rural communities may offer strong opportunities for belonging, these can be undermined by stigma, limited service access, environmental instability and reduced anonymity. In this sense, protective processes are therefore contingent on local context and conditions.
The findings suggest that effective suicide prevention requires a shift towards integrated, multi-level approaches that strengthen connection, build coping and adaptive skills, and improve environmental safety and system-level supports. Interventions targeting a single domain are unlikely to be sufficient. This presentation will support attendees to identify gaps in current approaches and apply these mechanisms to strengthen community, service, and system responses in their own contexts.
Biography
Dr Laura Hemming is a researcher at La Trobe University’s Rural Health School and the Violet Vines Marshman Centre for Rural Health Research. Her work focuses on youth suicide prevention, particularly in rural and regional communities, with an emphasis on protective factors, co-design, and lived experience. She leads an umbrella review synthesising evidence on protective factors against suicide in young people, drawing on over 500 studies to identify key mechanisms such as connection and belonging. Laura’s broader research spans rural mental health, service design, and community-based interventions, aiming to inform practical, prevention-focused approaches that strengthen wellbeing and reduce suicide risk.
