Presents the presidential address from the American Association of Suicidology convention held in Washington, D.C., in 1988. Urges the association to set high standards for certification of crisis centers, advocate for evaluation, train crisis intervention and suicide intervention workers, continue to support the association journal, and become a…

Presents interview with Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society (an international right-to-die organization), who shares his personal experiences, as well as his efforts to educate the public and stimulate legal reform. Notes Humphry has dedicated more than a decade to this highly charged universal problem. (Author/ABL)

Investigated divorce-suicide relationship in Finland. Cochrane-Orcutt time series analysis confirms divorce-suicide linkage for Finland. A 1 percent increase in divorce was associated with 0.24 percent increase in male suicide and 0.12 percent increase in female suicide. Given that divorce and religiosity trends were highly correlated, concluded…

Identifies telephone technologies that may affect hotline services: Caller Identification, which displays number of in-coming call; Call Block, which prevents connection of calls from specified numbers; and Call Trace, which traces current or most recent call. Presents four cases highlighting issues created by availability and use of new telephone…

Challenges literature on Jonestown mass suicide which claims that residents came to common consciousness. Analyzes data of what took place in Jonestown in months leading up to and on day of November 18, 1978. Using Durkheim's typology of suicides, argues that residents of Jonestown died for different reasons and that altruistic and fatalistic…

Dispels five misconceptions surrounding the suicide of children: that children under the age of six do not commit suicide; that suicide in latency years is extremely rare; that psychodynamically and developmentally true depression is not possible in childhood; that child cannot understand finality of death; and that children are cognitively and…

Studied lives of suicidal individuals by operationalizing each of 15 theories of suicide with 10 statements and rating these 150 statements as present or absent in lives of 30 famous suicides for whom biographies were available. Theory of Aaron Beck was found to be most applicable to suicidal lives and that of Freud was least applicable.…

Describes community efforts in Washington, DC, to construct 8-foot high antisuicide fence on Ellington Bridge, number one jump site (historically) for suicides. Describes opinions in favor of and opposed to construction of the fence, then invites commentaries from Patrick O'Carroll from the Centers for Disease Control and from Morton Silverman…

Our aim was to understand better how people judge the acceptability of physician-assisted suicide (PAS). We found that, for people in France of all ages and for elderly people with life-threatening illnesses, acceptability is an additive combination of the number of requests for PAS, the patient's age, the amount of physical suffering, and the…

This study evaluated factors that predicted poor treatment response for 70 suicidal youth (ages 10 to 17 years; 67% African American) who received either multisystemic therapy (MST) or inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. Following treatment, suicidal youth were classified as either treatment responders or nonresponders based on caregiver or…

This study evaluated factors that predicted poor treatment response for 70 suicidal youth (ages 10 to 17 years; 67% African American) who received either multisystemic therapy (MST) or inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. Following treatment, suicidal youth were classified as either treatment responders or nonresponders based on caregiver or…

Using the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance data (n = 13,917) of high school students, we examined the association between four domains of risk factors (alcohol/drug use, aggression, HIV risk-related behaviors, and health problems) and indicators of suicidality (considering a suicide attempt, making a plan to attempt suicide, and actually…

The aim of the study was to determine rates and correlates and to predict cigarette use for Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian adolescents in Hawai'i. Data were collected on a multi-ethnic adolescent sample of 7,317 students in five high schools from three islands in the state of Hawai'i from 1992-1996. Psychopathology symptoms, school measures,…

Disordered eating, body dissatisfaction, and obesity have been associated cross sectionally with suicidal behavior in adolescents. To determine the extent to which these variables predicted suicidal ideation and attempts, the authors examined these relationships in a longitudinal design. The study population included 2,516 older adolescents and…

The objective of this study was to identify the impact of a patient's suicide on psychiatrists in Thailand. A confidential coded postal questionnaire survey was sent to 320 eligible psychiatrists; with a response rate of 52.18%. The results showed that 94 (56.28%) of responding psychiatrists had a patient die by suicide, consistent with high rates…