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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Suicide in older people
— mode of death, demographic factors and medical contact before death | | Author(s) | Daniel Michael James Harwood, Keith Hawton, Tony Hope |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 15, no 8, August 2000 |
| Pages | pp 736-743 |
| Keywords | Suicide ; Demography ; General practice ; Coroners inquests ; Berkshire ; Buckinghamshire ; Nottinghamshire ; Oxfordshire ; Birmingham. |
| Annotation | Details of all inquests on people aged 60 and over who had died between 1 January 1995 and 1 May 1998 in which a verdict of suicide was made were collected by regular visits to coroners' offices in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Birmingham. Findings confirm some of the well-known factors associated with suicide in older people, particularly male gender (67.7%) and single or divorced marital status. The commonest methods of suicide were hanging in men and drug overdose in women. Reducing the prescription of combination analgesics and tricyclic antidepressants might prevent some deaths. Only 15.4% were under psychiatric care at the time of death, and only a quarter had had contact with psychiatric services in the year before death. 49.8% had seen their general practitioner (GP) in the month before death; but more than half of these last consultations were for physical complaints, highlighting the difficulty of identifying those at risk of suicide in primary care. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-001107205 A |
| Classmark | EV: S8: L5: JVM: 8BE: 8BU: 8NT: 8O: 87E |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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