The socio-demographic profile of hanging suicides in Ireland from 1980 to 2005

This paper provides a comparison of the socio-demographic profile of hanging suicides and suicides by other means in Ireland from January 1st 1980 to December 31st 2005. Data on 9674 suicides occurring in that time frame was provided by the Central Statistics Office of Ireland (CSO). 4031 (42%) of these deaths involved suicide by ‘hanging, suffocation or strangulation’ (HSS), with the remainder being suicides by other means. Binary logistic regressions were used to examine six potential risk factors for suicide across the two groups: Gender, marital status, employment in the agricultural sectors, residential location (urban/rural) and age were entered in Block 1 of the analysis, with year of death (pre 1994 vs. post 1994) added in a second block. Results indicate that those dying through hangings were statistically more likely to be male (OR = 3.1, 95% CI = 2.8–3.5), single (OR = 1.3, 95% CI = 1.2–1.4), rural-dwelling (OR = 1.1, 95% CI = 1.0–1.2), agri-employed (OR = 1.3, 95% CI = 1.1–1.4) and to have died since 1994 (OR = 2.3, 95% CI = 2.1–2.5). The magnitude of the group effect was moderate for all but the gender and time period comparisons. Hanging suicide victims (m = 37.7, sd = 16.7) were also significantly younger than other suicide victims (mean = 42.72, sd = 16.7), although the size of the effect was small (r = .16). Overall the six variables explained 6% of the variance in the criterion variable.