| Suicide:
The Irreversible Option
If,
in a morbid moment, you wonder who would be most likely to make
an attempt on your life, look in the mirror.
Your prospects of committing suicide are 70 percent greater
than your chances of being murdered.
Every
17 minutes, on average, an American takes his or her own life
and 25 others attempt to do so. With a toll of more than 30,000 lives a year
in this country, suicide ranks eleventh among causes of death. Five million living Americans have survived
suicide attempts – a number that grows by 765,000 each year.
The
rate of suicide has trended slightly downward over the past decade,
from a high of 12.4 per 100,000 population in 1990 to 10.8 per
100,000 in 2001 – the last year for which complete statistics
have been compiled.
Making
that trend less encouraging than it might seem is the widely held
belief that suicide is significantly underreported by the medico
legal community – somewhere in the 10 to 50 percent range, by
one authoritative estimate. A number of factors are cited for this probable
undercounting, including variations in state legal standards for
a ruling of suicide, forms of suicide that mimic accidents or
natural death, fatal patterns of risky behavior arising from suicidal
impulses, and community and family pressure to avoid suicide rulings.
Some experts believe that up to 15% of auto fatalities
are actually suicides by vehicle.
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