Suicide on the Indian subcontinent

The Indian subcontinent comprises eight countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and the Maldives) and a collective population of more than 1.3 billion people. 10% of the world's suicides (more than 100,000 people) take place in just three of these countries, viz. India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. There is very little information on suicides from the other four countries. Some differences from suicides in Western countries include the high use of organophosphate insecticides, larger numbers of married women, fewer elderly subjects, and interpersonal relationship problems and life events as important causative factors. There is need for more and better information regarding suicide in the countries of the Indian subcontinent. In particular, studies must address culture-specific risk factors associated with suicide in these countries. The prevention of this important public health problem in an area of the world with myriad socio-economic problems, meager resources, and stigmatization of mental illness poses a formidable challenge to mental health professionals, policy makers, and governments of these countries.     

Two further comments on Durkheim's Le Suicide

It appears that the publications of Goldney and Schioldann (2000, 2001a,b, 2002) touched a chord, namely, the quality of the basic literature of contemporary suicidology and the usage of certain words and concepts. This paper adds two comments to this discussion. The first comment focuses on the usage of "altruistic," "egoistic," and "anomic" suicide. The second is a comment on the reception of Le Suicide.     

Suicide in the Ukraine

The suicide rates of the 24 provinces (oblasts) of the Ukraine were found to be strongly associated with indices of social disintegration (such as divorce and illegitimacy rates), with the Western provinces incorporated in the USSR later than other Ukrainian territories having lower suicide rates and lower levels of social disintegration.     

Preventing suicide in prisons, part I. Recommendations from the International Association for Suicide Prevention Task Force on Suicide in Prisons

In 2000 the Department of Mental Health of the World Health Organization (WHO) published a guide named Preventing Suicide. A Resource for Prison Officers as part of the WHO worldwide initiative for the prevention of suicide. In 2007 there are new epidemiological data on prison suicide, a more detailed discussion of risk factors accounting for the generally higher rate of suicide in correctional settings in comparison to the general population, and several strategies for developing screening instruments. As a first step, this paper presents an update of the WHO guide by the Task Force on Suicide in Prisons, created by the International Association for Suicide Prevention. A second paper, by the same Task Force, will present some international comparisons of suicide prevention services in correctional facilities.     

自杀性恐怖袭击及其治理

自“9·11事什”发生以来，恐怖主义活动虽然遭到世界各国的联合抵制和打击，但其发展趋势在世界范围内却并没有从根本上得到抑制或扭转，而在某些国家和地区尤呈猖獗之势，其主要表现特征是自杀性恐怖袭击被频频使用，对所在国家乃至整个国际社会的安全与稳定构成严重的威胁与挑战。     

The Emergence of Female Suicide Terrorists

Female suicide terrorists do not differ significantly from their male counterparts in terms of individual motivations. Although societal oppression may play a minor role in their self-recruitment to terror organizations women do not bomb themselves primarily to drive a feminist cause. Instead they act out of motivations inside conflict zones of trauma, revenge, nationalism, expression of community outrage and in non-conflict zones feelings of alienation, marginalization, negative self-identity, and a desire to act on behalf of those inside conflict zones. Groups find it to their advantage to use female bombers as they receive more media attention, increased sympathy for the terrorist cause, are able to pass security measures more easily than men, and are more dispensable because they are rarely in leadership positions.     

Political attitude estimation through Facebook like: a South Korean case study

Recently numerous studies are conducted to estimate the human personality from the online social activities. This paper develops a comprehensive model for political attitude estimation leveraging the Facebook Like information of the users. We designed a Facebook Crawler that efficiently collects data overcoming the difficulties in crawling Ajax enabled Facebook pages. We show that the category level selection can reduce the data analysis complexity utilizing the sparsity of the huge like-attitude matrix. In the Korean Facebook users’ context, only 28 criteria (3% of the total) can estimate the political polarity of the user with high accuracy (AUC of 0.82).     

Terrorism,Signaling, and Suicide Attack

This article examines the strategic utility of suicide terrorism. Suicide terrorism, we suggest, can be thought of as a form of strategic "signaling." We define terrorism as a signaling game in which terrorist attacks are used to communicate a group's character and objectives to a set of target audiences. This is followed by an examination of the utility of suicide attacks as a signaling tactic. The relative effectiveness of suicide operations is evaluated in relation to other tactical options that are traditionally available to terrorist organizations. We go on to examine the institutional and social context of suicide terrorism, concluding with an examination of the evolutionary use of suicide attacks by Palestinian terrorist organizations and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.‐     

Suicide risk in patients with somatization disorder

The aim of the study was to assess suicide risk in psychiatric outpatients with and without somatization disorder. A total sample of 120 psychiatric outpatients was used in the study, 29 of whom met diagnostic criteria for somatization disorder. The results indicated that somatization disorder was significantly associated with suicide attempts even when the effects of both a comorbid major depressive disorder and a comorbid personality disorder were statistically controlled for. The results suggest that, although a patient meets the criteria for a principal diagnosis of major depressive disorder and/or a personality disorder, it is still of significant importance to decide whether or not the patient also meets the criteria for a somatization disorder in order to more optimally assess suicide risk. The findings highlight the fact that the potential for suicide in patients with somatization disorder should not be overlooked when a diagnosable depressive disorder or personality disorder is not present.