Facts and Figures, 1993

Fra rapportens forord

In many countries, parasuicidal behaviour has been identified as a major public health problem with considerable impact on the use of resources at both primary and secondary levels.

In the absence of national data, information on parasuicide has been collected mainly from local surveys which vary widely in terms of the definition of parasuicide, representativeness of samples, the period covered, etc.

For these reasons, it was decided that the WHO Regional Office for Europe should stimulate and support an international collaborative study designed to provide a more appropriate epidemiological picture of parasuicide in the European Region.

The WHO Regional Office for Europe hopes that the preparation of this report will contribute to the dissemination of information in the study and stimulate interest in further research and international collaboration in this field

Fra rapportens introduktion

Increasing rates of suicide and attempted suicide have caused great concern in most European countries for many years.A planning group (which eventually consisted of one representative from each participating research centre) was constituted; its task was to develop a strategy and then detailed plans for carrying out a coordinated multicentre European research project. It was decided that the project would cover two broad areas of research:

• monitoring of recent trends in the epidemiology of parasuicide, including the identification of risk factors (the monitoring study(; and
• follow-up studies of parasuicide populations as a special high-risk group for further suicidal behaviour, with a view to identifying the social and personal characteristics predictive of future suicidal behaviour (the repetition-prediction study).

Sixteen centres from 13 different countries are now participating in the study. The catchment areas studied by these 16 centres differ to varying degrees as a result of differences in political and economic factors, cultures, lifestyles and so forth. Each centre was therefore asked to describe its catchment area: demography, history and other general and specific characteristics.

The first part of this report is based on these descriptions. The first section describes the catchment areas, including the most essential demographic data; the second section provides information on social conditions and indicators of social instability; the third section more comprehensively covers the health and health care; and the fourth section discusses the data on suicidal behaviour and on treatment of suicidal people in the various areas. All data in the tables are from the centres unless otherwise indicated

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