A PRELIMINARY PSYCHIATRIC STUDY OF ATTEMPTED SUICIDE AS SEEN IN A GENERAL HOSPITAL

There were some I98,ooo people who killed themselves between i9 and 1952(6) and a great many more who tried to do so. Of all these human beings, the 155 who at-tempted suicide and who were studied for this report are a very small percentage, too small to be the basis for reliable statistics or for proving or disproving any existing hy-pothesis on suicide. They may be a large enough percentage, however, to be typical of some of the actions, emotions, methods, and motivations of other suicidal people. To pre-sent the data of the 155 human beings is the purpose of this paper. It is an effort “To see the world in a grain of sand. ” 1 All were admitted to the psychiatric service of the Massachusetts General Hospital. The other suicidal patients in the service and hospital during the 9 years were not included in this study because their records lacked adequate information on the suicidal at-tempts or were untraceable. Many were filed under medical or surgical diagnoses: infected lacerated throat wounds, for example, or pneumonitis following drug ingestion. The patients were not a typical sample of the population. Mostly people who lived near the hospital, they were in low-income brackets and of special national groups. Forty were interviewed directly by the authors; 115 were studied in the records. LITERATURE The literature on suicide is voluminous. Summaries of some of the findings follow. The role of social sciences in the study of suicide cannot be overemphasized (5). Dy-namic formulations are very important in individual cases (8). In “successful ” suicides, men outnumber women in a ratio of 3 to i in attempted suicides, men are outnumbered by women in a ratio of I to 3(1, 2, 3, and 6). In age, the peak for men is from 25 to 29 years; and for women, from 20 to 24(2, 3