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Assessing Legal Strains and Risk of Suicide Using Archived Court Data
Author(s) -
Cook Thomas Bradley
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
suicide and life‐threatening behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.544
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1943-278X
pISSN - 0363-0234
DOI - 10.1111/j.1943-278x.2012.00107.x
Subject(s) - suicide prevention , suicide risk , injury prevention , poison control , medicine , human factors and ergonomics , occupational safety and health , medical emergency , psychiatry , environmental health , psychology , criminology , law , political science
Relatively little is known about legal entanglements and suicide risk. This matched case–control study estimated the risk of suicide associated with legal strains using online court archives, a novel source of exposure data. Court records linked to suicide deaths ( N = 315), controls ( N = 630), and unintentional injury and poisoning deaths ( N = 630) for an urban county from 2000 to 2005 revealed that nearly a third of suicide victims had recent court involvement, twice the proportion among controls. Misdemeanors, car accidents, and foreclosures were each associated with a threefold risk of suicide. Implications for suicide prevention and research are discussed.