Suicide and Parasuicide in Ireland

You all know how I spent the money I made over the last six months (as frugally as a young man of my circumstances and disposition would), but as well as eeking out an existence on the financial fruits of my work, I have also benefited from the facts I have learned in the course of my documentation of cases of parasuicide, which will contribute to a national report of the phenomenon as documented in 2004 that will be published toward the end of this year.

I would like you too to benefit from a few statistics about this very common phenomenon by sharing a few simple statistics with you on the matter which I imagine you will find informative at the least.

Though the term parasuicide does include suicide attempts, it also encompasses any act of self-harm for which an attendance at an Emergency Service (as opposed to a GP) is required, and can include some attempts at self-harm which were prevented by intervention by others. The WHO has divided methods of suicide and self-harm into 22 specific methods (5 of which are different types of overdoses and which collectively made up almost three quarters of suicide attempts in Ireland in 2003).

In Ireland, approximately one in every one hundred people who attend Accident and Emergency Departments are there explicitly because they have deliberately harmed themselves. These people come from deprived areas 4 times more often than affluent areas; present between the hours of 8pm and 4am, half of the time; and are noted to have consumed alcohol 42.6% of the time. In the hospital where I was gathering information on the subject, they had an average over 18 cases a week in 2004.

When people hear the term suicide, they often think of it as a phenomenon affecting young men. And while men have been 4.2 times more likely to die by suicide than women in Ireland in the past five years, placing the statistics of parasuicide next to this figure gives a far more rounded picture of the phenomenon. For every male suicide in 2003 there were approximately 13 male episodes of parasuicide, but for every female suicide there are 76 parasuicide episodes. It is women who are in the majority when it comes to parasuicidal behavior, and they remain in the majority when actual suicide numbers are integrated.

Of the numbers of known hanging and drowning attempts in 2003, 73% of them were made by men and they died 50.5% of the time as a result; and of the 27% who were female, only 25% died as a result. While one or other of drowning or hanging represented the method used in 74.3% of actual suicides in men, it was only chosen by women in 58.6% of cases; with drowning, hanging and drug overdoses being used with almost equal frequency at around 29% each.

Of all parasuicide episodes recorded in 2003, the methods of hanging or drowning were 6.5% of all male cases, and a mere 2.6% of all female cases. The overwhelmingly frequent method in both sexes was overdose, and it represented 64% of male parasuicide cases and almost 80% of female cases (with women representing 57.4% of all parasuicide cases).

From these figures a prima facie reason for the preponderance of males in acts of suicide in Ireland seems to be the methods they more often chose to employ: hanging and drowning. This is coupled with the fact that they are also more likely to succeed with these methods. As I did my research this year I was struck by how often parasuicide patients expressed their relief to be alive after a serious suicide attempt and it is saddening to consider how many young men who died by suicide would have said the same, had they had survived.