Citation

González-Forteza C, Villatoro Velázquez J, Alcántor Escalera I, Medína-Mora ME, Fleiz Bautista C, Bermúdez Lozano P, Amador Buenabab N. Salud Ment. (Mex) 2002; 25(6): 1-12.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, Instituto Mexicano de Psiquiatria)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

According to census data, Mexico is a country of children and youths. In 1995, 39% of the population was under 14 years old and 29.6% was between 15 and 29 years old. So, this population, ranging from 0 to 29 years, represented two thirds of the total population of the country (68.2%). The capital of the country, Mexico City, concentrated 9.3% of the total population, and the proportion of children and young students is obviously considerable, so that researching their needs in the mental health field turns into a priority. In several countries of the world, it has been recognized that suicide among adolescents is a public mental health problem, and Mexico is not an exception in this sense. The main question here is knowing how frequent the problem is among adolescent students. Unfortunately, official health records do not specifically distinguish this feature, because they only report statistics according to gender and age, but not according to population type (such as students). Because of that, it is highly important to create systematic and periodic registers that allow for the detection and monitoring of tendencies from an epidemiologic perspective. Detecting risk groups and idenfifying risk and protective factors is highly important in order to deal with the adolescent suicide problem. Taking into account two measurements, carried out in 1997 and 2000, the aims of the present study are: 1. To identify the prevalence of suicide attempts in Mexico City according to the following indicators: political delegation, gender, educational level (junior high school, high school, and technical high school), and type of school (public or private), 2. To describe suicide attempt characteristics in men and women according to: number of times (to distinguish between single attempts and recurrent suicide behavior [two or more times]), age at the moment of the attempt, main motive and methods used, and lethality indicators. To carry out the sampling, we randomly selected schools from each of the 16 political delegations of Mexico City. The design of the sample was stratified, bi-staged and by conglomerates. The stratification variable was the educational level: junior high school, high school, and technical high schools. At the first stage, the unit of selection were the kind of schools and, in the second stage, the school level group, The final sample for the 1997 study was made up of 10,173 students and that for the 2000 study was of 10,578 students. To inquire about suicide attempt and its characteristics, previously evaluated indicators were applied to learn about the occurrence of the suicide attempt and the number of times, the age at the moment of the single or last attempt, the motives behind it, and the methods employed to carried it out. These last two indicators were designed as an open question in order to establish the range of possible methods and motives to carry out a suicide attempt. In the 1997 study, the indicator of lethality were the values taken from the hospitalization-treatment report following the suicide attempt; and in the 2000 study, the indicator was the wish to die. The prevalence of the suicide attempt in Mexico City in 1997 was 8.3% (n=849), and in 2000 it increased to 9.5% (n=1,009). In 1997, the following were the political delegations with prevalences higher than the global at least in one percentual unit (≤9.3%: Cuauhtémoc (11.3%), Tlalpan (10.1%), Iztacalco (9.9%) and Benito Juárez (9.6%); and in 2000 (≥10.5%): Benito Juárez (12.3%), Venustiano Carranza (12.1%), Gustavo A. Madero (11.8%) and Cuauhtémoc (10.6%). This problem was more frequent in women (more than three for each man). In high school, the prevalences were higher; nevertheless, the ages of the single/last suicide attempts reported indicated that, for the majority, the event occurred during the last years of elementary school and/or during junior high school. In addition, there was a large number of suicide attempts in private schools, specially at the high school level. While suicide attempts in students were more frequent among women, it was observed that the profile of its characteristics was similar between men and women according to: age: occurrence of the single/last attempt: between 10 and 15 years old; recurrence: in the two studies, one out of each four women had carried out at least two suicide attempts; in men, this ratio was one out of five students with suicide attempt in 1997, but in 2000 it increased to one out of each three with suicide attempt during the life-time; motives: in both sexes, a clear predominance of motives of suicide attempt related to the interpersonal sphere (specifically family conflicts as a expression of familiar violence) was observed, followed by motives related to the emotional sphere (such as depressive feelings); methods: the most frequent method, which also showed a tendency to increase was: self-cutting with a sharp instrument (frequently, a cutter or a piece of glass); lethality: almost a third part of the students of both sexes reported they carried out the single or last suicide attempt having the wish to die, and almost half of the students reported that they did not think about living or dying as a consequence of the suicide attempt.

Language: es

Keywords

Adolescents; article; education; Epidemiology; human; lethality; measurement; methodology; Mexico; politics; prevalence; register; risk factor; sex difference; student; Students; suicidal behavior; suicide attempt; Suicide attempts