Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2009
Introduction
Despite its salience as a cause of death amongst illicit drug users, suicide has been a relatively neglected area of research in the drug and alcohol field. This is curious because, as noted previously, it has long been known that there are extremely high levels of depressive disorders amongst this population (Darke & Ross, 2001; Degenhardt et al., 2001; Dinwiddie et al., 1997; Teesson et al., 2005), and suicide is a leading cause of death amongst illicit drug users. Despite its status as a “hidden issue” of the illicit drug field, however, suicide presents a major clinical challenge to those treating drug-dependent users, and needs to be recognised as such. The current chapter examines rates of suicide, methods employed, and risk factors amongst the general population and illicit drug users. Both completed and attempted suicide are examined, representing two aspects of a single phenomenon.
Suicide amongst the general population
Rates of completed suicide in the general population vary greatly from country to country. For example, rates higher than 0.3 per thousand are reported in Finland, Hungary, and Sri Lanka compared to rates of approximately 0.1 per thousand in the US, UK, and Australia (Diekstra & Gulbinat, 1993; Hassan, 1995; Lynskey et al., 2000).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.