Suicide Statistics on the Rise

10 September 2008

The World Health Organization reports today, on World Suicide Prevention Day that one suicide attempt occurs approximately every three seconds, and one completed suicide occurs approximately every minute. According to WHO assessment, this means that more people die by suicide than by armed conflicts.

The statistics in the region are not encouraging either. According to Kosovo Police Service statistics, during the first six-month period of 2008 25 cases of suicide in Kosovo have been reported, together with 105 suicide attempts.

In 2007, a total of 48 suicides were registered, with Prishtina leading with seven cases, followed by Peja/Pec with 4, Prizren 5, Mitrovica 5, Gjilan/Gnjilane 3 and Ferizaj/Uro�evac with one suicide.

The situation is similar in Serbia, where the number of people considering or attempting suicide is on the rise, according to the Novi Sad-based Suicide Prevention Centre `Srce`. Suicide is most common among people between 50 and 70 years of age, usually connected to pathological conditions such as alcoholism, psychological problems and depression, and other health and psychological conditions.

Tijana Mandić, a psychotherapist, says that prevention is the best possible way to fight suicide, which doesn`t happen overnight and there are usually individual and systemic indicators that a person has decided to `solve the problem` through auto-destruction.

Suicide has huge psychological and social effects on the family � each suicide touches, on average, six other people, sometimes hundreds if it was committed in the workplace.

Another problem noted by WHO is the fact that, although most people considering suicide don`t really want to die, they are vulnerable to the publicity and treatment the media give to cases of suicide.

That, so called `Werther Effect� (after Goethe`s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther), has motivated WHO to recommend to the media to take special care when covering suicide cases and trustworthiness of their sources of information, because of the effect they may have on other suicides.