The desire to die is not always a reason for suicide, according to a Parisian study. Acts are often precipitated by personal crises.
Each year, 10,000 people choose to end their existence. In addition to these deaths, there is the colossal number of suicide attempts. Every year, 200,000 French people try to suppress themselves. And yet the prevention of these acts is painful in the country. Better understanding what pushes these people to such extremes is precisely the goal of a team from the Bichat-Claude-Bernard hospital (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris). She publishes, in Psychiatry Research, a detailed study on the profile of suicidal patients.
Qualified responses
This work examines the case of 168 people admitted to Paris psychiatric emergencies after a suicide attempt. If the reasons are varied, one element emerges: in one in two cases it is a conflict or a romantic disappointment which accelerated the passage to the act. Not surprisingly, so many patients recognized suicidal thoughts in the past month.
However, not everyone suffers from severe depression. The disease was diagnosed in 53% of people admitted to the emergency room, and only 3% suffered from psychotic symptoms.
It’s hard to explain what prompts someone to end these days. This study does, however, provide an overview of risk factors, starting with the desire to die. During a first suicide attempt, this feeling is often motivated by a personal crisis and considerably increases the probability of being hospitalized directly in a psychiatric ward.
Faced with a recurrence, things are more nuanced. The wish to end your life is unrelated to the number of attempts. Moreover, only a third of the participants expressed such an inclination.
A heterogeneous group
Other factors, relating to daily life, on the other hand, play a preponderant role in the risk of recurrence. Unemployment, for example, triples the likelihood of repeatedly attempting to kill yourself. Like age, the psychiatric past has a major influence on the number of attempts. More than half of the participants have already been followed by a specialist and more have received treatment for psychiatric purposes. They are three times more at risk of recurrence than the others.
But it is the people who have stayed in a psychiatric ward in the past who are the most exposed to multiple attempts. The risk is multiplied by fifteen after a hospitalization of this type.
The realities are therefore varied for suicidal patients, as this work reminds us. Their authors also stress that these people should not be considered as a homogeneous group. It is only at this price that prevention can be adapted and effective.
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