Suicide and Substance Abuse

The layman may readily say that committing suicide is evidence that a person was of unsound mind. However, the first clear demonstration of the intimate connection between psychiatric illness and suicide was presented by Robins and colleagues¹in 1959. The authors found that nearly all of a consecutive series of 134 suicides had been psychiatrically ill. This finding has been replicated in Seattle,²in the United Kingdom,³in Sweden,4*5in Australia,⁶and, most recently, in San Diego.⁷It is no longer news. While it is clear that psychiatric illness is a virtually See also p 589. necessary precondition for suicide, it is not a sufficient reason in itself. We know that persons suffering from depression, alcoholism, and schizophrenia are at high risk in comparison to those with other psychiatric illnesses and even more so compared with the general population. However, the low proportion of