Information on the Causes of Suicide

Suicide is defined as the act of taking one's own life voluntarily, the law considers this act as self-murder because it is the intentional destruction of one's own life by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind. A study was done on the Stereotypes of Suicide Causes (Salin Salin & Turner, 1994).

To summarize the study showed that there are four major causes of suicide. The first one is external frustrations, which includes family pressure, social pressure, problems in a love relationship, discord in the family and economic problems. The second cause is unpleasant life events like academic failure, terminal illness, unpleasant sexual experience or death of a loved one. The third cause is depressive personality which brings about feelings of loneliness, hopelessness, touchiness, pessimistic point of view on life and introversion. The last cause is old age because this may cause depression, health problems, senility, feelings of being a burden on others and feelings of guilt after doing a life review. The study showed that these four major causes affect different age groups at different levels.

My opinion is that people who commit suicide find it an easy way out of different situations, it is a selfish act committed by cowards because they do not care about the fact that their act affects their loved ones that are left behind.

Also even though this study tried to cover the major causes of suicide, I think it is very hard to do an extensive study which will reflect without a doubt the causes of suicide, because the subjects being studied are already dead. Hence, this study had to use fictitious male and female suicide committers.

For a study to come close to finding out the cause of suicide, the subjects would have to be individuals who tried to commit suicide but survived. However even though this would seem like the right way to do the study, normally suicide survivals want to be found and saved, those that are serious about committing suicide make sure that there is no way they will survive.

The best prevention for suicide is to go back to the basics of life, people need more community support, life needs to go back to the times when neighbors knew and spoke to one another. Due to the speed of life there are people going on their day to day life without being acknowledged or recognized that they exist, hence when they encounter a problem they feel as though they are the only ones going through the problem, this causes the problem to magnify itself in their minds and they tend to see it as bigger than it actually is. Also parents need to teach their children that there is no problem too big and that has not been solved before, if children know this from a young age then they will grow up to be strong individuals who can face anything that life throws their way.

Reference:

Salin N., Salin H. N. & Turner S. (1994). Stereotypes of Suicide Cause for Three Age/Gender Cohorts. International Journal of Psychology 29, (2), 213-232.