Suicide of elderly persons: Towards a framework for prevention

Abstract

Suicide is an act of intentionally terminating one's own life. Although suicide rates vary across demographic categories, they have increased by approximately 60% in the last 50 years. Many studies of adolescent suicidal behavior have noted impulsivity to be a common feature in the younger age group, while with older people there is evidence of planning and a strong intent to die. In fact, older people are most successful as an age group with approximately one in four attempts resulting in death. While very comprehensive statistics are available on many aspects of this problem for the Turkish population as a whole, this data does not include physical factors like illnesses, legal domiciles like nursing homes, economic standards and history of attempted suicides. This necessary data would add greatly to the available data and accuracy of research in this area. Whereas Turkish national risk factor procedures are available, precaution procedures and suicide attempt data is not. There is no way of knowing how many deceased had a history of repetitions. It is suggested that this could be attributed to routine failure to observe and mitigate risk factors. The size of this problem is being demonstrated with this presented case report about a planned complex suicide with multiple sharp forced injuries and substance intoxication; a completed suicide that was potentially preventable with timely detection and intervention. In accordance, suicidal risk factors in the old age population, precautions, along with the characteristics of this suicidal case, are evaluated within existing published work.

Suicide attempts: epidemiologic trends towards geoprocessing

“…According to data of United Nations (UN), suicide is found among the ten main causes of death in the world for individuals of all ages, thus being a relevant health care problem 1 . Studies made in several countries have shown that rates of suicide attempts are frequently high and provide evidence that this fact is continuously underestimated [2][3][4] . The causes relate particularly to social factors like unemployment 5 and illnesses as depression 6 and schizophrenia [2][3][4] .…”

İlginç Bir İntihar Yöntemi Olgu Sunumu

“…Literatürde tamamlanmış intiharlarda en sık kullanılan yöntemlerin ası, ateşli silah ve kimyasal maddelerin olduğu bildirilmiştir (2,8,9). TUİK verilerine göre ülkemizde intihar yöntemleri bölgelere ve cinsiyete göre kısmi farklılık göstermekle birlikte en sık ası yöntemi kullanıldığı belirlenmiştir.…”

Social Connectedness in Preventing Suicide among Older Adults

“…The risk factors associated with suicide in older adults are mixed and varied. Most common are intentional self-harm with previous histories of suicide attempts [9,[17][18][19], chronic pain [1], physical illness [20][21][22][23], functional impairment [23,24], loss of a partner or a significant other [25,26], alcoholism [27], loneliness or hopelessness [20,21], depression [17,20,[28][29][30][31], economic dependency [1], remoteness [32] and social isolation [17,20,21]. These suicide risk factors either individually or collectively can affect older adults, but in most of the scenarios recorded globally, it was discovered that the integration of several suicide risk factors influences late-life crisis [20].…”