Suicide: introduction

Many factors put individuals at risk of suicide, with four key groups of risk factors identified:

• risks and pressures within society, including poverty and inequalities, access to methods of suicide, prevalence of alcohol problems and substance misuse, and changing trends in society such as marital breakdown;
  
• risks and pressures within communities, including neighbourhood deprivation, social exclusion, isolation, and inadequate access to local services;
  
• risks and pressures for individuals, including sociodemographic characteristics, previous deliberate self harm, lack of care, treatment and support towards recovery from serious mental illness, loss (e.g. bereavement or divorce), and experience of abuse;
  
• quality of response from services, including insufficient identification of those at risk.
  

The relationship between these factors is complex. Choose Life's action plan - Scotland’s suicide prevention strategy and action plan - states that such factors should not be addressed in isolation.

The epidemiology of suicide in Scotland 1989-2004 published in March 2007 examines temporal trends and risk factors.

Please note that when considering suicide data, it is conventional to combine deaths by intentional self harm with deaths of undetermined intent.