High Suicide Rates Among Gun Owners Not Due to Depression

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High Suicide Rates Among Gun Owners Not Due to Depression

The relationship between household gun ownership and high suicide rates cannot be explained by levels of either major depression or suicidal thoughts, reveal US investigators.

Gun ownership in the US is high, note David Hemenway and M Miller, from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, with over 200 million members of the general population owning firearms.

To investigate whether the higher rates of suicide due to gun ownership are related to mental disorders, the team assessed handgun ownership across nine US regions. This data was compared with mental health variables, specifically major depression and serious suicidal thoughts, from a national household survey of adults aged between 15 and 54 years.

Across the nine regions, overall suicide rates ranged from 9.0 per 100,000 of the population in the Mid-Atlantic region to 18 per 100,000 in the Atlantic region. The four regions with the highest levels of gun ownership also had the highest levels of suicide.

Analysis indicated that handgun ownership was positively associated with the firearm suicide rate (p<0.01) and overall suicide rate (p<0.05), but negatively associated with the non-firearm suicide rate (p<0.01).

Importantly, suicidal thoughts were positively correlated with all three suicide rates (p<0.01), but not with handgun ownership, while major depression was not associated with any of the four variables.

Even after accounting for depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as any one of four other additional influential factors - urbanization, education, unemployment, and alcohol consumption - handgun ownership remained correlated with suicide rates purely because of the strong association between gun prevalence and firearm suicide.

The study is published in the journal Injury Prevention. Injury Prevent 2002; 8: 313 ? 316

http://www.psychiatrymatters.md/news/2002/week_49/day_5/p_0000052641.asp

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