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Abstract
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Suicide ranked as the eleventh leading cause of death in the United States in 2001. There were 30,622 suicides as compared to 20,308 murder victims. The suicide rate of 10.8 per 100,000 people per year was higher than the homicide rate of 7.1, and so people were 50 percent more likely to commit suicide than to be murdered. On the average, one person committed suicide in this country every 17.2 minutes (McIntosh 2003). However, compared to other countries, suicide mortality in the United States is not as dire as it may seem. According to the World Health Organization's World Health Statistical Annual (now online at www.who.int), in 2000 Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia had the highest suicide rates, almost four times that of the United States.9
If we use the years of life lost under the age of sixty-five to measure the significance of mortality, then suicide is ranked as the third most important contributor after heart disease and cancer (Congdon 1996). Thus suicide (and, we might add, nonfatal suicide attempts) is one of the major issues facing health and social service providers, especially given the recent trend of rapidly rising suicide rates among youths in many nations (Mathur and Freeman 2002; Freeman 1998; Willis et al. 2002; Middleton et al. 2003; Eckersley and Dear 2002; Micklewright and Stewart 1999; Birckmayer and Hemenway 2001; Al-Ansari et al. 2001; Christoffersen, Paulsen, and Nielsen 2003).
Unfortunately, scholars admit that suicide is still poorly understood despite numerous publications addressing the incidence and causes of suicide (Ruzicka 1995). This may be because suicide is a result of a "multidimensional malaise in a needful individual" (Shneidman 1985, 203), making the causes of suicide "complex and multifactorial" (Gunnell et al. 2003). While psychologists and psychiatrists try to understand suicide in individuals from a psychiatric or mental illness perspective (Lester 1988, 1991; Maris, Berman, and Silverman 2000), sociologists approach suicide from a societal perspective (Lester 1989), and epidemiologists focus on how different segments of the population are affected by suicide (Maris, Berman, and Silverman 2000).10 Each of these approaches catches only one facet of the phenomenon, rather than the whole.11
Without a unified theory of suicide that deals with behavior at the individual level and social influences at the macroecological level, we cannot trace the mechanism of how individuals...
Language: en |