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Abstract
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Two methods of research into suicide are criticized. First, no study has ever been published diagnosing suicides for their psychiatric status by psychiatrists ignorant of the death by suicide and with an appropriate control group. Second, no psychological autopsy study has been published examining the accuracy of informant data, especially those studies using informants to report how the suicide would have answered a psychological inventory.
Many articles on suicide begin by noting how common suicide is, often noting that roughly 800,000 suicides occur each year world-wide (Wasserman, et al. 2020). Therefore, it is argued, suicide presents a major public health problem, and research is urgently needed in order to prevent suicide and reduce the loss of life from this cause.
Yet despite this urgency, very little research is conducted on suicides. It is not easy to conduct research on those who have died by suicide, which is why the vast majority of the research uses the method of substitute subjects, that is, studying those who have suicidal ideation or who have attempted suicide. Although, Lester, et al. (1975;1979) suggested how this research might be improved so as to generalize from ideators and attempters to suicides, their suggestion has rarely been used in research.
Research on suicides has focused on suicide notes and, more recently, the diaries left by suicides. However, only about 25% of suicides leave notes, and so the generality of conclusions drawn from suicide notes to those who do not leave notes is open to question. Diaries from suicides are rare, and I have obtained less than a dozen (Lester, 2014).
It is, therefore, important to conduct research on suicides and that this research be methodologically sound. The following two sections review some of the pitfalls facing researchers and what might be done to overcome these problems.
Language: en |