The etiology of adolescent suicide with special reference to the role of firearms and other opportunity-related factors.

Abstract

In recent decades, throughout the industrialized world, youth have shown an increasing vulnerability to self-destruction. This thesis supports research which argues that modifying the availability of firearms could act as an immediate approach to the prevention of adolescent suicide. I add to existing psychological and sociological theories, which fail to address the issue of opportunity and the situational factors around an adolescent taking their life, by focusing not only on theory but on the empirical research upon which the validity of these and subsequent theories must depend. I argue that the explanations for suicidal behaviour must, in general, depend on an interactional theory in which socialization, cognitive, intrapsychic, biological factors and opportunity all play a part. For the purposes of this thesis, I have used a cross-section of studies that include the four primary methods of studying the epidemiology of suicide, including: (1) profile analyses; (2) restrospective and prospective investigations of patients who come to clinical attention on account of attempted suicide; (3) cohort analyses; and (4) psychological autopsies of suicides. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)