Profiling Chilean Suicide Note-Writers through Content Analysis

Suicides account for 2000 deaths in Chile each year. With a suicide rate of 11.3, it is classified as a country with high suicide risk. Aims: to identify personality and cognitive characteristics of the group of Chilean suicides that left suicide notes, through a content analysis. Methods: descriptive field study with an ex post facto design. All suicides registered between 2010 and 2012 by the Investigations Police of Chile were analyzed, obtaining 203 suicide notes from 96 cases. The Darbonne categories for content analysis were used with the inter-judge method. Results: The mean age of the suicides was 44.2 (SD = 18.53). Most of the notes were addressed to family members (51.7%). The most expressed reasons were marital- or interpersonal-related (24.6%); another 23.6% expressed a lack of purpose or hopelessness (including depression, wish to die, low self-esteem). The most frequent content expressed were instructions (about money, children, and funeral). All of the notes showed logical thinking and were written with coherence and clarity. Notably 42% of the notes were marked by affections of fondness, love or dependence of others. Regarding attitudes, the most common were of escape or farewell (42.4%), followed by fatalism, hopelessness, frustration or tiredness (40%). 24 statistically significant differences were found throughout the categories of analysis, according to cohorts of age, marital status and sex. Conclusions: the findings contribute to the profiling of Chilean suicides and to the implementation of suicide prevention programs.