Kushnarev history of suicidology development in Russia

The development stages of national suicidology are integrated into our country’s twisted history. The ”prescientific” stage is represented by interconnected religious, moral, ethical and legal approaches, penal measures being introduced since Middle Ages, particularly due to tsar Peter’s reforms. After the post-reform 1860s the evolution of legal proceedings, statistical committees, local administration bodies and mass media resulted in describing suicide as a social phenomenon, worth highlighting by news items and statistical analysis. In the 19th century the ’’typical view of suicide” and research trends were determined by referring suicide to heredity, or/and mental illness, or/and social factors. In the late 19th-early 20th centuries “classic” statistical studies for defining high risk suicide groups emphasized the social demographic features (age, education, family, income) as well as religious beliefs of the victims. Since the late 19th-early 20th centuries, at the stage of “proto-suicidology”, suicidal behavior as an individual act and social phenomenon has been tackled by theology, philosophy, psychiatry, pedagogy, jurisprudence and assessed from moral and ethical point of view, while at the medical-statistical level it has been studied by deviation sociology. Since the second half of the 20th century suicidology has been established as a self-sufficient discipline. In the 60th-70th of the 20th century the ”renovation” of the invariably urgent issue and confirmation of suicidology as a field of scientific knowledge at the intersection of medical and social sciences became feasible in the USSR and, later, RF due to a fruitful multi-disciplinary and multiagency approach to comprehensive research, treatment and prevention of auto-aggressive behavior. The systematic longevity (since the70-s of the 20th century) of studying suicidal behavior as a biopsychosocial phenomenon allowed to create a scientifically verified corner-stone for the original suicide genesis conception by prof. A.A. Ambrumova as well as for the suicidological (anticrisis) national pattern, whose structural and functional flexibility implies potential upgrading.