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Jeffrey H. Boyd, MD
Connecticut Mental Health Center 34 Park St New Haven, CT 06508

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1981;38(6):720.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

I read with interest the three lead articles in the May 1980 issue of the ARCHIVES that suggest that younger people have a cohortspecific increased risk of suicide (1980;37:505-510, 511-513, 519-523). While these findings are provocative, it is not mentioned by the authors that these trends might be due to an artifact caused by diagnostic differences. The World Health Organization undertook a study to examine why the rates of suicide varied by a factor of ten from one country to another.¹ It found that there is so much variation in the manner in which different coroners diagnose suicide that the variations in rates of suicide could be attributable to artifact. Where a coroner chooses to draw the boundary between suicide and accident is not a matter determined by specific diagnostic criteria that are widely accepted; it is often idiosyncratic.¹ Furthermore, unless there has been a . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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