Afiqah Zainal Abidin
B1100446
Department of Psychology
PSY 113
Mr. Kenneth Phun
Suicide is an act or gesture of self-infliction with the intention to take one’s own life (Mazza, 2006). Mazza (2006) suicidal behavior theory includes three stages. The first is suicidal ideation, which it is the thoughts of suicides by the individual to a more critical condition of suicide behavior (Mazza, 2006). The second is suicidal intent, it is the intention of the individual at the time of suicide attempt to the yearning of death (Mazza, 2006). Thirdly is suicide attempts, this is when the individual does self-inflicting injuries behavior for the intention of causing death (Mazza, 2006).
Krug, Mercy, Dahlberg, Zwi and Lancet (2002), estimated 1.6 million death in 2000 and half of it were caused by suicide. Adolescents is the age group that is most common with suicide attempt (Evans, Hawton, Rodham and Deeks, 2005) and in 2002, World Health Organization (WHO) projected that it is the age group with the highest risk of suicide in both developed and rising countries .
According to Lin (2008), as cited by Gau et al (2008), in the western countries, the adolescent group’s suicide rate had an acute increase after the year 1950s, in contrary of Asian countries which only have a gradual increase. By the year 2004, suicide death has moved drastically to the second leading cause of death among the 15-24 age group (WHO, 2002). Majority of the individuals within the said age group are students ranging from high school to college.
Gau et al (2008) discovered an important correlation between psychological, behavioural, and familial patterns with suicidal risks among college students in Taiwan with different levels of suicidal risks. In this research, Gau et al (2008) gave 2919 participants a questionnaire and they were asked to scale the questions based on their current and past suicidal behaviours. The result