Testing multi-disciplinary theories of suicide using a cross-cultural database

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

At its most fundamental level cultural anthropology seeks to explain the similarities and differences between cultures. One approach to this is the coding of ethnographic cases from individual anthropologists into data sets that can be used to conduct statistical tests of hypotheses. This proposal takes this approach in a cross-cultural study of suicide. Worldwide, suicide accounts for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined. Attempted suicides, which among young adults are estimated to outnumber completions by a factor of 100-200, often cause serious injury. The vast majority of research on suicidality has been conducted in a narrow range of societies, primarily the nation states of Europe and its former colonies, using study designs that provide little information on the social and cultural contexts of individual suicide cases. Hence, theories of, and treatments for, suicidality are currently developed with little detailed knowledge of the phenomenon in the majority of human societies. Given increasing cultural and ethnic diversity in the U.S. and more frequent online interaction between people of different cultural backgrounds, understanding the cross-cultural motivations and causes of suicide is a benefit to public health. This project will investigate suicide using ethnographic data from 245 societies representing a broad range of human cultural diversity. Cross-cultural data on suicide will be obtained from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), which contain over a million pages of ethnographic reports, spanning several centuries, on hundreds of different cultures.Key theories of suicidal behavior from anthropology, clinical psychology, and evolutionary biology will be tested against ethnographic accounts of suicide in the HRAF. The theories will include: a group of related anthropological explanations for suicide which see it, in part, as a means for relatively powerless individuals to strike back at powerful others with whom they are in conflict; leading theoretical models from clinical psychology, which emphasize escape from pain, burdensomeness on others, problem solving deficits, and emotional dysregulation; and a theory from evolutionary biology that views suicide as a costly signal of need. In addition, the accounts of suicide will be synthesized in a meta-ethnography, providing a comprehensive anthropological view of suicide that will complement perspectives from other disciplines.