Suicide is an action in which a human being kills himself or herself with his or her own obvious will and power. Of the many age groups, older people aged 65 and over in particular constitute a group with the highest risk of suicide. In order to preve...
Suicide is an action in which a human being kills himself or herself with his or her own obvious will and power. Of the many age groups, older people aged 65 and over in particular constitute a group with the highest risk of suicide. In order to prevent elderly suicides, it is one of the most important tasks to examine risk factors with precise understanding of elders at high risk of suicide. Though prevalence of suicide thinking and factors that have influence on it have been often mentioned in the previous studies, consistency or correlationship among individual factors have not been well-established.
Thus, the aims of this study were 1) to examine differences in suicidal ideation on the basis of the social demographic characteristics, pain, ability to lead a routine life, family supports, and depression of community dwelling elders, and 2) to examine the influence of factors on suicidal ideation.
A questionnaire survey was performed to 157 community dwelling elders in Gyeongju-si from July 1 to August 31 2011. The main instrument used for this study was composed of the VAS to measure pain, the K-ADL scale to examine the ability for a routine life, Choe's (1983) scale for family support measurement, the Korean version abridged scale of elderly depression that Ki (1996) adapted from Yesavage et al.'s (1986) scale, and the GDSSF-K, which was developed by Beck et al. (1979) and adapted by Shin et al. (1996). All of the collected data have undergone one-way ANOVA or t-test, Pearson Correlation, and stepwise regression by means of SPSS 18.0K for Windows, and the results are as follows.
More than half of the whole subjects recognized their health status as bad, and most of them reported moderate or more than moderate pain. The number of diseases was 1.96 in average, and an average of 20.76 was yielded from the results of the measurement of the ability to lead a routine life. The scores of family supports and depression were 33.68 and 4.82 respectively, and that of suicide ideation turned out to be 4.84 in average. The suicidal ideation in elders without religion was measured significantly higher than other groups, and groups reporting their economic status was low had suicidal ideation more frequently than others. Also, those elders who recognized their perceived health status as bad showed significantly higher suicidal ideation than those who reported they were in a good health status.
As a result of the measurement of correlations, it turned out that there was a negative correlation among the number of social meetings, perceived health status, and suicidal ideation, and that the number of diseases had a positive correlation with suicidal ideation. Furthermore, the ability to lead a routine life and family supports had a negative correlation with suicidal ideation respectively, and pain and depression had a positive correlation with it respectively.
As a result of the stepwise regression, only depression turned out to be a variable that accounted for suicidal ideation. That is to say, the more serious the degree of depression, the more frequently suicidal ideation occurred, and the explanatory power with the variable of depression was measured as 42.1%.
Therefore, in order to lower the suicide rate in elders, which is rapidly increasing currently, nursing intervention is required to be able to the level of suicidal ideation in those elders who have no religion and a bad health status. Also it is believed that it is necessary to check up whether there is suicidal ideation in elders who have only a few social meetings to participate in and are vulnerable economically, and we should also carefully assess suicidal ideation in elders who suffer from a number of diseases currently, who have a lowered ability to lead a routine life, who do not receive family supports, who are in an alienated class, who report chronic pain, and who report depressive feelings. Of such factors, depression in particular is a variable that runs easily into suicidal ideation in elders, and hence morbidly depressed elders should be necessarily cared on the side of the prevention of suicide.
Key words: community dwelling elders, pain, ability to lead a routine life, family supports, depression, suicidal ideation