Suicide in Dublin

Abstract

Professor Carstairs (1961) has stated: " Southern Ireland has a reported suicide rate which is among the lowest in the world, but this is a country in which the Roman Catholic Church has great authority.It is doubtful whether there really are few suicides or whether there, for religious reasons, great pains are taken to represent suicide when it occurs as death from other causes."Since no work had previously been done on suicide in Ireland, we decided to study suicide in Dublin over a 10-year period.We were especially concerned to establish a reliable suicide rate for the area under consideration and by extension to draw some hypothetical conclusions about suicide in the country as a whole.We were also interested in investigating the social, economic, and medical patterning of our suicide sample both in itself and in relation to such key studies on suicide as those of Cavan (1928) in Chicago, Sainsbury (1955) inLondon, and Farberow and Shneidman (1961) in Los Angeles. Present InvestigationMethod.-Permission was obtained from the Dublin City Coroner and the County Dublin Coroner to examine their records for the years 1954 to 1963 inclusive to find every case coming to their courts during that period irrespective of the verdicts they returned.To this end we examined, in the first place, the registers of both coroners for 1954 to 1963.Entries in these registers in each case described briefly the mode and circumstances of death, and if any of the entries were such as to indicate the possibility of self-inflicted death then the records for that case were scrutinized in detail and suicide was either confirmed or excluded.In three cases we were unable to decide from the evidence available whether the person had killed him- self or not, and these three were excluded from further con- sideration.The data presented therefore cover every suicide known to either coroner occurring in the Dublin city and county area with a population of 718,332 (Census of Population of Ireland, 1961) from 1954 to 1963 inclusive.Sample.-There were 315 suicides in the sample.Of these, 31 were excluded from analysis because the coroner's records of them were incomplete.In three of the excluded cases the suicide had removed all traces of identity, so that very little information was available.The remaining 284 cases comprise the group discussed below.Rate.-With 315 suicides for 10 years for the population studied, the mean annual suicide rate for the period was 4.5 per 100,000 of population.Age and Sex.-There were 158 male suicides (55.6% of the sample) and 126 (44.4%) female (Table I).The breakdown by age group shows the low incidence in early adolescent life, rising through the third and fourth decades and falling a little in the fifth, reaching a peak at ages 50 to 70 and then falling.This trend is also evident in the age-specific rates showing the annual rate per 100,000 population in each group, with a con- siderable preponderance in males over 60, which largely accounts for the overall male excess.

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