There was a study done in Iraq on suicides in 2015 and 2016. Because of the lack of Iraq’s national surveillance system, there is not much that is known about the suicides or/and their epidemiology. Because of this lack of a surveillance system, their government started a project known as “The Iraqi National Study of Suicides”. There are about 18 provinces of Iraq, and this study, about which I am talking about, covered 13 provinces.
For this study, the researchers prepared a data collection form. Those forms were to be filled out by the police stations in the 13 provinces covered. These reports collected the data on the cases which involved those deaths which were considered as suicides, because they had no clear cause of death.
He data was extracted from legal investigations which include the police investigation reports, family reports and postmortem reports.In these 13 provinces, there were about 647 cases of suicides. The data showed some very interesting result; the suicide rate per 100,000 population was 0.97 for females in 2015 and 1.07 for females in 2016. It also showed that majority cases, i.e.
67.9%, were below the age of 29. The methods mostly used were hanging, use of firearms, self-burning. But the fact to ponder upon is the cause and the most common diagnosis was depression which was 53.9%.
If we talk about the reasons, then they were mostly psychological trauma, financial problems or child abuse.One of the drawbacks, or the limitations of that study was that it only covered the 13 provinces of Iraq and it was possible that the reports included under-recognition of any psychiatric disorders.If we talk about the results or the research outcome of the study, we can clearly see that the suicide rate in Iraq is pretty low as compared to the global rates. The gender distribution is almost equal and we can also see that it is more common in young people. Also, social and cultural factors play an important role in this.
