Suicide

Strain Correlates

Within this category there are four factors: socioeconomic status, unemployment, age, and age and gender.

Socioeconomic Status

Suicide risk among those of lower socioeconomic (SES) status can be related to their problems of living. Poorer physical health, higher levels of mental troubles, much lower objective personal safety due to much greater rates of victimization in violent and predatory crime, economic strain due to low incomes, higher rates of divorce and family disruption, greater rates of substance abuse, and many other factors can combine to increase suicide rates. Lower SES groups tend to have a higher suicide rate in most studies performed in a variety of settings. For example, in California, the suicide rate among laborers is over three times that of professional technical workers (84.6 versus 26.5 per 100,000). In the United States as a whole, laborers have a rate of 94 per 100,000, eight times the national average. In Australia, manual workers (laborers, skilled blue-collar workers, and others) had a suicide rate of 32.5 per 100,000. This is significantly higher than the elite managerialprofessional group, which has a suicide rate of 20.5 per 100,000. Some caution needs to be exercised in interpreting these results based on broad categories of occupations. Some high-status, specialized occupations have high suicide rates for special reasons. The suicide rate for dentists, for example, is 6.54 times the national average. Dentists often command a lower level of prestige than physicians, because they are paid considerably less [Page 1598]than medical doctors and report greater levels of alienation from their customers. (For example, few people enjoy going to the dentist, because of such factors as fear of pain).

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