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Abstract
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The incidence of suicide in Buffalo is remarkably low. The annual suicide rate was 7.6 per 100,000 in 1960 and Buffalo ranked 50th among the 56 largest metropolitan areas in America. Seattle, for example, in 1960 had a rate of 17.1 per 100,000. It may be that Buffalo does have a truly low suicide rate. However, it is more likely that the manner of deciding which deaths are suicidal in Buffalo militates against a death being classified as suicidal.
The Erie County medical examiners do not carry out a large proportion of autopsies on potentially suicidal deaths. For example, Table 1 reports data from 1968. Only 6.7% of deaths classified as suicide and 64.5% of deaths classified as undetermined were autopsied.
It has been found in Los Angeles, where almost all potentially suicidal deaths are autopsied, that the proportion of individuals found with drugs in their bodies at death is directly proportional to the proportion autopsied. It is clear that the certification of death in Erie County is based on less than ideal information. (Mildred Spencer has written a series of articles in the Buffalo Evening News that document the inefficiency of the operation of the Erie County Medical Examiner.)
Suicide rates for different groups of the population have been computed for Erie County. Because of the relatively small number of suicidal deaths, the rates for each year vary widely. In order to compute reasonably reliable rates, the rates were computed for five-years intervals around the two years in which census counts were taken, 1960 and 1966. The rates are shown...
Language: en |