Socioeconomic factors affecting suicides in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Most of the people think the meaning of suicide is some person choses to kill themselves, but the real explanation of suicide is some person acts of intentionally causing one’s death (Suicide terminology, Wikipedia). Other than that, they do not want to live furthermore in the world. Most of suicidal people have some types of mental conditions at that moment. Moreover, suicide is a sign of serious depression, and hence suicide and depression have strong interrelated connection.1–4 Approximately 800,000 people die due to suicide annually around the world, furthermore one person die due to suicide every 40 seconds in the world. Therefore, suicide is one of the most important global health problems in the world and it is a complex human behavior.5 Suicide occurs many countries, however suicide rate is relatively low in high income countries.6 Among total suicide around the world, 78% of suicides occur in low and middle-income countries. In Sri Lanka, more than 4000 people die due to suicide annually. According to the report conducted by the,7 Sri Lanka was ranked in the 3rd position among the 172 countries in terms of most suicide prone countries in the world. Since final few decades, Sri Lanka’s suicide rate was very high, in 1995/96, suicide rate in Sri Lanka was 47.0 per 100,000 populations, that was more than two times global suicide rate.8 In 2016 suicide rate of Sri Lanka was 28.8 per 100,000 populations, while the global rate was 16 per 100,000 population considered by WHO, that was approximately two times global suicide rate.9,10