Suicide motives and culture - Degree of modernization, response behavior and acceptance

Background: National suicide rates are relatively stable over long periods but differ considerably from one another. Considering that the acceptance of suicide motives in the general population might be associated with national suicide rates, a multi-centre survey on this topic was planned by the Vienna Research Group in Transcultural Psychiatry. Method: 610 healthy interviewees from Georgia, Lithuania, Nigeria, Austria, Pakistan und Poland completed a 46-Item questionnaire on attitudes towards and assessment of suicide-motives. Results: Subjects from European countries showed a highly distributed pattern of response with high acceptance of a few and almost total rejection of most other suicide motives. In contrast, subjects from Nigeria and Pakistan were indifferent towards most of the motives; however, in general the Nigerians expressed more understanding for suicide motives than the Pakistanis with their almost total rejection of suicide. Single suicide motives were unanimously highly accepted in all investigated societies; apart from that there are also culture-specific motives. Conclusion: The acceptance of suicide motives, mirrors the persistence of social value systems and their regulative mechanisms (e.g. shame-guilt), which seem to have some influence on national suicide rates.