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SUICIDE!

Joseph Hansen

Are homosexuals more likely than are other people to commit suicide? There are no statistics to prove it, nor are there statistics to disprove it. So reports Dr. Edwin S. Schneidman, co-director of Suicide Prevention Center, and perhaps the world's foremost authority in his field.

Located in Los Angeles, the SPC is the largest and most complex institution of its kind. Rescue, Inc., of Boston, FRIENDS in Miami, Florida, and the National Save-a-Life League in New York, are all devoted to preventing suicide. But the SPC, with its staff of more than 20 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, consultants, nurses and research associates, undertakes the education of both physicians and the lay public, and has opened doors of knowledge to a subject area too long taboo.

Suicide is tenth on the list of the of the nation's killers. In California, suicide accounts for more deaths than traffic accidents. Between July 1961 and July 1962 nearly 1,000 people

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killed themselves in Los Angeles county alone. Psychiatrist Albert Schrut reports the known annual suicide rate in New York city as eight to 10 per 100,000 population.

Yet when Dr. Shneidman and Dr. Robert E. Litman started the SPC under a U. S. Government grant, no major center for the systematic and continuing study of suicide existed. With energy and imagination the center has undertaken research into motives for suicide that is proving helpful in the diagnosis of potential suicide victims and which should in time effectively lower the toll of fatalities.

One of the most important tools Dr. Schneidman and Dr. Litman have devised for the systematic study of suicide is what they term the Psychological Autopsy. By a study of suicide notes taken from the records of the Los Angeles County Coroner's office, and through interviews with relatives and friends of suicide victims, they have uncovered facts that can help