SUICIDE

SUICIDE

SUICIDE

Introduction

Suicide continues to be a behavior with a surprising degree of regularity in its extent and distribution among social groups. There are about 30,000 suicides per year. In the general population, the rate of suicide has ranged between 10 per 100,000 and 13 per 100,000 for fifty years. It ranks as one of the top ten causes of death. Furthermore, unlike most causes of death, suicide can be prevented. While most people probably fear being murdered more than suicide, the chances of dying by your own hand (11.3 per 100,000) are significantly higher than the chances of being murdered (6.8 per 100,000).

The significance of the problem of suicide extends beyond its 30,000 victims each year. For every suicide, there are, on average, six relatives or people (“suicide survivors”) close to the victim. Many survivors experience considerable mental anguish, including guilt, after a suicide. There also are approximately 450,000 suicide attempts per year. At least 5 million of those now living have attempted suicide. Finally, all of these figures are underestimates. Many suicides are disguised as accidents, or death is attributed to other causes, in order to protect the reputation of the deceased and their families.

Major Correlates Of Suicide

Strain, social bonds integration, social learning, and personality factors—the chief correlates of suicide—are not mutually exclusive. For example, the low suicide rate among women may be a product of their relatively high religious social bonds to coreligionists who provide emotional support. In addition, the low suicide rate among women may be due to their lower learned level of approval of suicide as compared with men. Furthermore, from a personality view on suicide, the immediate cause of suicide is major depression. Many of the other perspectives (e.g., economic strain, loss of bonds to a spouse through divorce), however, can be used to explain some of the variability in depression. Often, the various correlates of suicide need to be merged together to obtain a more systematic view of the problem.

Strain Correlates

Within this category there are four factors: socioeconomic status, unemployment, age, and age and gender.

Socioeconomic Status

Suicide risk among those of lower socioeconomic (SES) status can be related to their problems of living. Poorer physical health, higher levels of mental troubles, much lower objective personal safety due to much greater rates of victimization in violent and predatory crime, economic strain due to low incomes, higher rates of divorce and family disruption, greater rates of substance abuse, and many other factors can combine to increase suicide rates. Lower SES groups tend to have a higher suicide rate in most studies performed in a variety of settings. For example, in California, the suicide rate among laborers is over three times that of professional technical workers (84.6 versus 26.5 per 100,000). In the United States as a whole, laborers have a rate of 94 per 100,000, eight times the national average. In Australia, manual workers (laborers, skilled blue-collar workers, and others) had a suicide rate of 32.5 per 100,000. This is significantly higher than the elite managerial professional ...