Unmet Psychological Needs and a Lost Sense of Purpose May Drive Suicide Risk in Young Adults

Suicide among young adults has been climbing in many parts of the world, and researchers are increasingly turning their attention away from crisis moments and toward the quieter psychological conditions that build up long before a crisis arrives. A new study from Türkiye, published in BMC Psychology, offers a detailed look at three of those conditions in university students: whether their basic psychological needs are being met, whether they feel their lives have meaning, and how deeply they engage with daily life. The findings suggest that these three factors together account for nearly half of the variation in suicide probability among the students studied, a strikingly large share for psychological research of this kind.

The research team, led by Hacer Kabakoğlu of Hatay Mustafa Kemal University and Rabia Arpacı of Hitit University, surveyed 415 university students aged 18 to 28 at a university in southern Türkiye. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling, and the study was designed as a descriptive and correlational investigation rather than a clinical trial. Each student completed a battery of standardized instruments: a personal information form, the Suicide Probability Scale, the Basic Psychological Needs Scale, the Meaning in Life Scale, and the Life Engagement Scale. The researchers then analyzed the data using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multiple regression analysis to determine how strongly each psychological factor predicted suicide probability, both alone and in combination.

The average scores painted a picture of a population under measurable strain. Participants scored 137.66 plus or minus 25.09 on the total basic psychological needs measure, 46.60 plus or minus 10.34 on meaning in life, 24.03 plus or minus 4.46 on life engagement, and 75.15 plus or minus 14.96 on suicide probability. While these are group averages rather than individual diagnoses, the statistical relationships between them were unambiguous. All of the associations between basic psychological needs, meaning in life, life engagement, and suicide probability were significant at the p less than 0.001 level, meaning the probability that these links arose by chance alone is extremely small.

The regression analysis delivered the study’s headline result. Taken together, basic psychological needs, the search for meaning, the presence of meaning, and life engagement explained 46.6 percent of the total variance in suicide probability, corresponding to an adjusted R-squared of 0.466. In practical terms, this means that nearly half of the differences in suicide risk between students could be statistically accounted for by these four psychological variables. Within that model, life engagement and basic psychological needs emerged as the strongest individual predictors, suggesting that how actively a student invests in their goals and how well their fundamental psychological needs are satisfied matter more, in this sample, than the more abstract question of whether life feels meaningful.

The concept of basic psychological needs comes from self-determination theory, a widely influential framework in psychology that holds that human beings have three innate requirements for healthy functioning: autonomy, the sense that one’s actions are self-chosen; competence, the sense that one is capable and effective; and relatedness, the sense of being connected to and cared for by others. When these needs are chronically frustrated, the theory predicts, people become vulnerable to a cascade of psychological difficulties, including diminished motivation, alienation, and despair. The present findings align with that prediction in a particularly consequential domain, showing that need frustration is tightly coupled with elevated suicide probability in young adults navigating the pressures of university life.

Meaning in life, the second pillar of the study, is typically divided into two distinct components, and the researchers measured both. Presence of meaning refers to the extent to which a person feels their life already has significance and direction, while search for meaning refers to the active effort to find or build that significance. The two are not simply opposites. A student can be actively searching without yet feeling any sense of purpose, or can feel a settled sense of meaning without much ongoing reflection. The inclusion of both dimensions in the regression model allowed the team to assess whether the feeling of meaning and the hunt for it carry different weights in relation to suicide risk, and both contributed to the overall explanatory power of the model.

Life engagement, the strongest predictor alongside basic psychological needs, captures something related but distinct: the degree to which a person commits to and invests energy in the goals and activities that matter to them. A student may report that life has meaning in the abstract yet still drift through their days without genuine commitment, and the data suggest that this behavioral dimension of purposeful living is where the protective effect is most visible. Engagement, in this sense, functions as the bridge between believing life matters and actually living as though it does. Its prominence in the model implies that interventions aimed simply at talking students into feeling that life is meaningful may fall short unless they also help students build concrete, absorbing commitments.

The authors frame these results as a contribution to understanding the current state of suicide probability among university students, identifying the factors associated with it, and developing effective psychosocial interventions to prevent suicidal behavior. That framing matters, because the study is correlational by design. It cannot establish that unmet needs or low engagement cause suicidal thinking, only that they move together with a strength and consistency that makes causal hypotheses plausible and testable. Longitudinal and intervention studies would be needed to confirm the direction of the arrows, but the size of the explained variance gives such studies a clear target.

The study also carries practical implications for universities and mental health services. Screening tools that assess psychological need satisfaction, meaning, and engagement could help identify students at elevated risk before acute symptoms appear, and campus programs that foster autonomy, competence, and connection, such as mentorship schemes, collaborative projects, and structured goal-setting support, map directly onto the strongest predictors identified here. The researchers note that their findings may guide the development of such psychosocial interventions, and the specificity of the results makes that guidance unusually concrete: bolster life engagement and meet basic psychological needs, and the statistical model suggests suicide probability should fall.

Published open access in BMC Psychology, the study was approved by the Hatay Mustafa Kemal University Ethics Committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with written and verbal informed consent from all participants. It received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. As suicide rates among young adults continue to rise, research of this kind shifts the question from the dramatic and the acute to the everyday and the structural, asking not only what pushes a person to the edge but what, in the fabric of ordinary psychological life, holds them back from it. The answer emerging from this work is that the weight of existence becomes unbearable most often when basic needs go unmet, meaning remains unfound, and life goes unlived with full commitment.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of suicide probability among university students

Article Title: The unbearable weight of existence: The effect of basic psychological needs, meaning in life and life engagement on suicide probability

Article References: Kabakoğlu, H., & Arpacı, R. (2026). The unbearable weight of existence: The effect of basic psychological needs, meaning in life and life engagement on suicide probability. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05666-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05666-0

Keywords: suicide probability, basic psychological needs, meaning in life, life engagement, self-determination theory, university students, mental health, BMC Psychology, regression analysis, psychosocial intervention, young adults, suicide prevention