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Mental disorders
Depression and Manic Depression
Anxiety Disorders
Alzheimer’s-type Dementia

Help Lien : Drug Abuse and Suicidal Behavior Workshop Lien : Bipolar disorder and suicide Lien : La prévention du suicide
Lien : Le déchirement du suicide Lien : Older Adults: Depression and Suicide Facts

It was once widely assumed that about 15% of all people who suffered from depression would eventually commit suicide. But more recent studies cite lower figures (2 to 9%), depending on whether the individual has been hospitalized for depression in the past and has attempted suicide before.

It has also been observed that while about 7% of all men who have experienced depression will end up committing suicide, only 1% of women will do so.

Lien : The Link Between Depression and Suicide

Research has shown that nearly 95% of people who committed suicide had deficiencies of serotonin in certain regions of their brains. Moreover, serotonin deficiency occurs three times more often in people who plan their suicides carefully and are hence more likely to complete them successfully.

Though serotonin levels might never become an objective factor for predicting suicide, they might become a useful means of identifying people at risk.

Lien : Scientists Study Serotonin Markers for Suicide Prevention

Suicide is rarely a coolly reasoned decision. Most of the time, it is a reaction to very intense feelings of loneliness, despair, worthlessness, or abandonment—in short, symptoms similar to those of depression, which is also the primary risk factor for suicide.

The psychological suffering caused by these emotions overwhelms the individual's resources for dealing with them, and suicide starts to seem like the only way out of this intolerable pain. In this sense, suicide encompasses two lengthy processes: the process of mental decline that leads the individual to consider suicide, and the especially difficult mourning process that awaits the friends and relatives who couldn't provide the help that this person needed.

The kinds of pain and the reasons for suicide cited by suicidal people vary widely. What may seem like no big deal to one person may seem intolerable to someone else who has a different value system. For example, being laid off from work might seem like a liberation to one person, but a disaster to another. Likewise, if a variety of people undergo the same negative experience, the point at which the pain becomes intolerable depends on the resources that each individual has for coping with it.

Having some suicidal ideas therefore doesn't mean that you are morally weak, or crazy. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die. It simply means that you currently suffering more than you can handle.

But if someone else confides in you that they are entertaining ideas of suicide, it's not good enough to just tell them to cheer up. First, you must take the time to listen to them, to patiently show them other ways of looking at things, and to direct them to places where people will listen to them and help them with their problems.

Since about half of all people who are suicidal are also clinically depressed, the treatments that are effective for depression can also give suicidal people some relief. Among people who are suicidal but not clinically depressed, abuse of psychotropic substances is often involved. Alcohol, for example, is a factor in about 20% of all suicides.

But as the philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists who have written about suicide have noted many times, suicide is a multidimensional phenomenon. It is multidimensional in the causes of the psychological suffering involved; many different risk factors, such as depression or drug abuse, can combine with personal, family, or social crises to predispose someone to suicide. It is also multidimensional with respect to the triggering threshold for suicidal behaviour, which varies with the individual's history and personality and the sources of social support that he or she can draw on. This availability of social support is often a decisive factor, and it is what makes suicide a phenomenon with a strong social component.

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