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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Are elderly suicide rates improved by increased provision of mental health service resources?
— a cross-national study | | Author(s) | Ajit Shah, Ravi Bhat |
| Journal title | International Psychogeriatrics, vol 20, no 6, December 2008 |
| Pages | pp 1230-1237 |
| Keywords | Suicide ; Death rate [statistics] ; Psychiatric treatment ; Cross national surveys. |
| Annotation | Suicide rates of older people (using World Health Organization age bands 65-74 and 75+) may be influenced by mental health service provision. A cross-national study examining the hypothesis that the relationship between suicide rates of older people and markers of mental health service provision would be curvilinear (inverted-U shaped curve) and fit the quadratic equation y= a + bx - cx2 (where y is the suicide rate of older people, x is a marker for mental health service provision, and a, b and c are constants) was undertaken using data from the World Health Organization (WHO. Results showed that the relationship between the logarithm of suicide rates in both sexes in both age-bands and the percentage of the total health budget spent on mental health, the total number of psychiatric beds per 10,000 population and the total number of psychiatrists per 10,000 population were curvilinear (inverted U-shaped curve) and fitted the quadratic equation y = a + bx - cx2 with statistical significance. The direction of the causal relationship could be examined in longitudinal studies, after further improvement in levels of mental health service provision, in individual countries segregated by low and high levels of existing mental health service provision. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-090825222 A |
| Classmark | EV: S5: LP: 3K |
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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