Uncovering the mechanism linking education expectation and suicide ideation among students in tertiary education: The mediating role of academic burnout, psychache, and hopelessness

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0337831 December 18, 2025 11 / 16 place a greater emphasis on academic success and therefore impose greater educational expectations on students than Western cultures (e.g., Australia) [53,54]. Analysis of the mediation models None of the models provided evidence to support the mediating effect of academic burnout on suicide ideation across the different sources of expectation and samples. Upon further examination of the pathways in each sample, self expectation was consistently negatively linked to academic burnout. This negative link suggests that, unlike demands from external sources, self-developed expectations are within one’s control and reflects one’s actual capacity, which are less likely to be emotionally and psychologically taxing, thus reducing the risk of burnout [39,40]. Our results also did not find a link between academic burnout and suicidal ideation across all models, which contradicts findings of a positive association between academic burnout and suicide ideation [55,56]. We postulate that the link between academic burnout and suicide may not be direct. Rather, the link can be better explained through the mediating role of psychache and hopelessness. As such, academic burnout is not a simple mediator between educational expectations and suicide ideation. For the second hypothesis, the mediating effect of psychache was mixed across different sources of expectation and samples. Psychache was a significant mediator for the models with the external expectation for the Malaysian sample

only. However, psychache mediated the link between cultural expectations and suicide ideation across all samples, sug- gesting a robust effect of sociocultural educational pressure on poor psychological outcomes and suicide risk. Although mixed, our findings are consistent with research demonstrating a link between external sources of expectation and poor psychological outcomes [19,26,29]. Moreover, the significant associations between psychache and suicide ideation across Fig 6. Culture expectation models. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0337831.g006