Suicide Risk, Suicide Risk Factors

Definition

Death from suicide in 1998 was ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the 12th leading cause of mortality worldwide. Suicide is the cause of death of one million people a year worldwide (Lineberry 2009). Suicide has been committed via several methods, which vary across geographic regions (Ajdacic-Gross et al. 2008). It is a main cause of death in later adolescence (ages 15–24 years; Shields et al. 2006).

The main difficulty in suicide prevention is its prediction because it constitutes a rare event and because of the multiple risk factors of suicide. These include situational factors such as social stressors and life events (e.g., unemployment, poverty), psychological factors such as hopelessness and hostility, biological factors (e.g., reduced brain-derived neurotrophic factor, protein kinase A; Dwivedi and Pandey 2011), and mere access to means of suicide (e.g., arms). One main difficulty in predicting suicidal behavior is the reliance on self-reported...