On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Deepak Shenoy <[email protected]> wrote: >> The data collection process for reported suicides would be fairly stable >> and consistent. A suicide is a subset of all unnatural death (UD) cases. >> These are difficult to manipulate, unlike some other crime statistics, due >> to the requirement to dispose of a dead body after following the legal >> process. All UD cases routinely go for autopsy and suicide as a mode of >> death gets established at the end of the inquest. > > I'd read a report (sadly, can't find it) that much of the suicide or > household accident cases went unreported earlier and suicides were > reported as illnesses to avoid autopsy which is slowly being fixed. I > remember in 2001 when someone I know tried to slit his wrist (largely > for show I think, he used a car key and managed only get seriously > scratched) - when we went to the hospital they told us not to admit > because the cops had become stringent and required registration for > every attempted suicide case etc. > > But the quantum some psychiatrists think it really is 95 per lakh > rather than the reported 9 to 11 - > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2913651/) which, if true, > means that my argument that data collection is better has yielded only > marginally better data :) > > Either ways - I concede that the suicide rate has increased - we are > at 11.4 officially versus, 5.8 per lakh in 1981. More than doubled in > thirty years! >
if you notice most of the sourthern states have the highest suicide rates : http://maithrikochi.org/india_suicide_statistics.htm#State_Rate given that ecnonomic development, unemployment etc are worser in some of the northern states, it could be argued there are cultural aspects to suicide ? i remember watching many tamil movies in the 80s all glorifying suicide ... the LTTE made suicide an elaborate ritual (i rememer a detailed propaganda video documenting day by day the starve to death hunger strike of thileepan .. who eventually died on camera ) . there is a region of tanzania with a tribe called the wahehe ...they have a similar approach to life and death, they have among the highest suicide rates in tanzania even though they are not the poorest or most backward.
