Why are we failing to further our understanding of suicide?

The main aim of this paper is to try and understand why our knowledge of why people take their own lives is so limited.

Methodological problems that have hindered our efforts to understand why people die by suicide are reviewed. Two solutions are proposed. The first describes a way of extrapolating from research on attempted suicides to those who die by suicide. The second solution is to develop a sound typology of suicides and search for causes for each type.

The piece provides a selective review of the literature on suicide.

This opinion piece is written by a researcher who has spent his entire career and much of his retirement studying the causes of suicide (Ed).