An Investigation into World-Wide Causes of Suicide

Essay by moomkinUniversity, Master's July 2004

download word file, 7 pages 3.7

An Investigation into World-Wide Causes of Suicide

Suicide (self killing) is the act of ending one's own life. As a matter of fact, this act is considered a very complex work particularly with regard to the reasons. However, there are a many different reasons which can lead people to commit suicide. Nowadays, suicide has become an important subject all over the world. That not only because it is a dangerous phenomenon which has an unfavourable effect on any society, but also because of the dramatic increase in the number of people who died as a result of suicide. According to world Health Organization statistics (March 2002), suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide between 1950 and 2000, and every year over 1,000,000 people around the world take their own lives by committing suicide. In addition, according to a new report (June 2002) from University of Oslo, suicide is likely to rise by 15% by 2020.

In fact, it is very simple nowadays to hear about people committing suicide around the word. So, this study aims to focus on the suicide reason.

Data about suicide is inexact for different reasons. Nonetheless, I believe that there are two main reasons for that. First, many countries around the world do not want to appear the social phenomenon which leads to suicide. Second, in many cases the police tend to classify suicide as an accident to reduce the family sad.

However, I have collected some statistics about suicide from World Health Organization and different countries websites:

Table 1

SUICIDE RATES(PER 100,000) NUMBER OF SUICIDE YEAR COUNTRY

38.7 55330 2002 RUSSIAN

24.1 30521 2000 JAPAN

22.5 250,000 1999 CHAINH

17.5 10268 1999 FRANCE

13.4 11156 2001 GERMANY

13.4 1196 2001 SWEDEN

12.7 2456 2001 AUSTRALIA

11.7 499 2001 NEW ZEALAND

11.7 3605 2000 CANADA...