The Relationship between Suicide Incidents in Slovakia and the Czech Republic and Heliophysical Parameters: Empirical Results

Abstract

Suicide has been attributed to social and economic factors but changes in solar radiation and geomagnetic activities may contribute to the frequency and the seasonal pattern of suicides. We studied the relationship between suicide episodes in Slovakia and the Czech Republic and parameters of solar, heliospheric and geomagnetic activity during the period of 1982 to 2011. Along with checking the linear correlation between the suicide event number and the physical parameters of outer space on yearly basis, the contribution of the harmonic component with periodicity near that of the heliophysical chracteristics was examined and optimum frequency of such contribution was estimated used detrended time series. The results show a weak effect of solar and geomagnertic activity variations on the suicide incidents in the given data set. Higher statistics and better temporal resolution of the data is needed to obtain more conclusive results.