Citation

Mahesar RA, Chandio DA, Latif M, Abbas S, Shabbir T. Asian J. Psychiatry 2022; 80: e103364.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ajp.2022.103364

PMID

36495729

Abstract

Death by suicide is an awfully complex problem that hurts hundreds of thousands of people every year across the entire world. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in 2021 almost 703,000 suicide deaths every year (World Health Organization, 2021b). It means one person dies from suicide every 45 s. It occurs throughout all the regions of the world, however, more than three quarters (77 %) of worldwide suicides in 2019 were recorded in low- and middle-income countries (World health Organization, 2019).

In Pakistan alone, 8.9 suicides occurred per 100,000 people (male 13.3 % and female 4.3 %) in 2019 (World Health Organization, 2021a), between 15 and 35 people die by suicide every day which is as high as one person kills himself every hour (Atika Rehman and Jahanzaib Haque, 2020). The threat of suicide is so serious that it is deemed as one of the biggest causes of human deaths. However, the developing countries mount to the 73 % of suicides globally, while in the Asian countries suicide accounts for 60 % of global deaths (Arafat, 2017).

Pakistan is a thickly populated country with current population estimation of 229,418,782 (World Population 2022, 2022). For it, however, suicide as a health challenge is yet to be addressed seriously. Although it has the different sources of information of suicide, such as media reports, police reports and forensic reports, there is also a paucity of research and lack of literatures on the suicide of this vast segment of population. Suicide takes place owing to multidimensional factors such as genetics, social, psychological as well as cultural risk factors. It is because suicide is an under-researched subject in Pakistan until now.

This paper aims to explore the suicide death based on the newspaper reports of Pakistani newspaper, targeting the risk factors of suicide and the demographic variables.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Pakistan; Public health; Demography; Risk factors; Newspaper reports