This article provides the first quantitative review of the literature on music and suicidality. Multivariate logistic regression techniques are applied to 90 findings from 21 studies. Investigations employing ecological data on suicide completions are 19.2 times more apt than other studies to report a link between music and suicide. More recent…

Previous analyses of the diary of Arthur Inman, who committed suicide in 1963, portrayed him as psychiatrically disturbed, warped, corrupt, and weak. In contrast, the present article argues that he was an eccentric individual whose diary writing enabled him to live a full life by giving his life a purpose and by enabling him to ventilate at…

Suicide is currently the second leading cause of death among college students in the United States. This complex issue on college campuses is often overlooked, and this book combines the efforts from several leaders in the field of suicidology in an attempt to grasp a better understanding of college student suicide. The book is divided into four…

Published Lester Attitude toward Death Scale for first time, together with data on its reliability and validity. Notes that scale is different from other fear of death scales in its use of scaled value approach that permits measure of inconsistency in attitudes. (Author)

Presents dialog among David Lester, author of first critical survey of death anxiety measures, developer of scales, and researcher about suicide and fear of death; Donald Templer, Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) creator; and journal editor. Lester and Templer discuss origins, uses, results, limitations, and future of death anxiety scales and research on…

The commentaries by Feldman and Leenaars are less than persuasive, insofar as they are grounded in an arbitrary and potentially inappropriate advocacy of communal rather than individual values; in unproven assumptions about the constricted and illogical reasoning of suicidal persons; in an implicit equation of their acts with "sins"; and/or in a…

Examined suicide rates in nations of the world from 1970 to 1980 to see whether absolute increases were related to size of suicide rates. Found that nations with higher suicide rates experienced greater increases in suicide rates. Results support critical-mass theory and are consistent with explanation in terms of suggestion. (Author/NB)

A questionnaire on attitudes toward death first administered to college students in 1935 was administered to college students in 1991. The students in 1991 showed much greater concern with and anxiety over death than did students in 1935. Cancer and car accidents remained causes of death most often anticipated in 1991 as in 1935 and 1970.…

Study of prejudice directed toward deviant and psychiatric groups and toward religious and ethnic groups involving 44 college student subjects replicated results of 25-year-old study. Deviant and psychiatric groups, including people dying from cancer and suicide attempters, received more prejudice than did religious and ethnic groups. Extraversion…

Explored attitudes toward death in 110 students, with masculinity/femininity scores as a covariate. Both sex and masculinity/femininity scores had little relationship with attitudes toward death. Furthermore, masculinity/femininity scores did not account for the sex differences observed, and sex did not account for the relationship between…

Explored relationship between participation of married women in labor force and suicide and homicide rates in United States. Found women's labor force participation related to homicide rates, with homicide rates higher in states where greater percentage of married women worked full-time. Suicide rates were more strongly related to indices of…

Debates the question of suicide as a defensible choice, particularly for the terminally ill, examining the relevance of such issues as the mortality, rationality, and dynamics of the suicidal act, and the legitimacy of physician-assisted suicide. Contrasting perspectives are articulated by two prominent suicidologists as a spur to the reader's…

Compared suicide notes of individuals using active and passive methods for suicide for presence of 50 classifications regarding psychodynamics of perturbation, lethality, relations, self-cognitions, etc. Two sets of notes resembled each other closely, only difference being that active group more often cited rejection by significant other as…

A meta-analysis was conducted on all studies of suicide mortality in follow-up studies of schizophrenic patients that presented data for male and female patients separately. The percentage of deaths from suicide was significantly greater for the male schizophrenic patients than for the female schizophrenic patients in studies where both sexes were…

In this study we analyzed the socioeconomic differences in mortality from suicide in the economically active male population aged 25-64 years in Spain and France in 1980-1982 and 1988-1990; in the case of Spain the data came from the Eight Provinces Study (Regidor, Gutierrez-Fisac, & Rodriguez, 1995). Individuals were grouped into four…