The Relationship between Parental Loss and Attempted Suicide: A Control Study

Attempted suicide has been described as “one of the most disturbing and costly abnormal behaviour patterns in our society” (29). Various suspected predisposing factors have been extensively studied, including physical and mental illness (e.g. 24, 17, 11, 25, 6), alcoholism (e.g. 19, 8, 3, 12), interpersonal conflicts (e.g. 10, 30, 14), old age (e.g. 15, 34, 23), and social isolation and degeneration (e.g. 7, 28, 33).