ALCOHOL AND SUICIDE BEHAVIOR

Abstract

Alcohol is one of the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world, with serious physiological and social consequences. Statistics show that the majority of violent deaths has something to do with the consumption of these substances and alcohol, having released their consumption in most of the world turns out to be one of the main responsible for such statistics. This work aims to address the association of alcohol consumption with suicidal behavior. The method used was that of literature from publications related to the Virtual Health Library (VHL) and SCIELO in Portuguese, Spanish and English, with indexing between the years 2009 to 2015. It was found in the great relationship between literature alcohol consumption and a higher incidence of suicide. The age group with the highest ratio of these two factors was between 34-45 years, however, the suicide rate remains higher in elderly men. The vast majority of studies discusses suicide on a multifactorial approach in which the alcohol and the occurrence of depression are some of the factors reported as the most common. For this reason it is suggested that the suicide challenge is seen as a triad: alcohol, suicide and depression. Only by addressing these three factors you can actually get a significant reduction in the number of suicide attempts and this.