8 - An idiographic approach to understanding suicide in the young

Summary

Harvard professor Edwin Boring, in his classic 1950 text, A History of Experimental Psychology, wrote that “ … science begins in the evolutionary scale with the capacity to generalize in perceiving an object; … seeing in the observed object the uniformities of nature” (p. 5).

In the scientific study of suicide, our generalizations speak to epidemiologic trends. Aggregated sets of cases allow for temporal and subgroup comparisons (e.g., males vs. females, young vs. old, whites vs. nonwhites). Differences in the distribution of cases in different populations or at different times suggest general explanatory factors and theories that may, in turn, define risk variables. Once validated, these risk factors fuel our efforts at early detection of and intervention with defined “at-risk” youth, as well as larger scale preventive efforts.

Much has been learned from and much has been gained by this nomothetic approach. Recent epidemiological-, psychological-, sociological-, and biological-suicidological research permits us to paint reasonably well a profile of an adolescent at risk (for completion of suicide) as a mentallydisordered, white male, who uses a gun (in the U.S.) or hangs himself (elsewhere in the world) “in the context of an acute disciplinary crisis or shortly after a rejection or humiliation” (Shaffer et al., 1988).

Yet, as valuable and important as these studies are, you might ask “Of what use are they?”, and “How do I apply, clinically, this mass of aggregated data?”.