Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms, Hopelessness, and Suicidal Ideation in Public Safety Personnel: A Network Analysis

Objective. Public safety personnel (PSP; e.g., police, firefighters, paramedics, correctional workers, and communications officials) face elevated risks of mental health concerns, including suicidal ideation and behaviours. Well-validated cognitive and interpersonal theories of suicide emphasize the roles of hopelessness, belongingness, traumatic exposures, and burdensomeness; however, the integration with symptom-level processes of posttraumatic stress remains limited. This study examined the relationships between posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSSs), hopelessness, and suicidal ideation in relation to suicidal contemplation in a large sample of PSP. Method. Data were collected between September 2016 and January 2017 from 1259 Canadian public safety personnel, including 623 who endorsed suicidal contemplation and 636 who did not. Participants completed validated self-report measures of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PCL-5), depression symptoms, including hopelessness and suicidal ideation (PHQ-9), and trauma exposure (LEC-5). Separate partial correlation networks were estimated for personnel with and without suicidal thoughts using regularized graphical models. Centrality was assessed with expected influence, networks were compared using the Network Comparison Test, and a directed acyclic graph was constructed to examine conditional dependency patterns. Results. Networks for personnel with suicidal contemplation showed greater overall connectivity. Comparison tests indicated that network structure and centrality differences were not statistically significant between groups. Descriptively, several trauma-related symptoms appeared somewhat more central in the contemplation network, although centrality differences were not statistically significant. Directed acyclic graph modelling identified conditional dependence patterns linking hopelessness and suicidal ideation, with PTSSs such as upsetting reminders and detachment also appearing in the model. Conclusions. Findings align with elements of cognitive and interpersonal theories of suicide while extending them to posttraumatic stress processes in PSP. The results provide exploratory hypotheses concerning hopelessness and trauma-related symptoms for future longitudinal and intervention research, while recognizing that the findings reflect cross-sectional, pre-pandemic associations.