Social factors and suicide: comparing the regional concomitants of Eastern European suicide mortality over the 20th century

The aim of this study was to investigate the social concomitants of Eastern European suicide mortality before and at the end of the Communist period, and whether these changed across time. Regional (guberniya, oblast, etc.) data on suicide mortality and several possible concomitants such as alcohol consumption, homicide rates, divorce rates, urbanity etc. were collected from Czarist "European Russia” in 1910 and from the corresponding areas in 1989. These concomitants of suicide mortality were studied with the help of correlative and regressive techniques. The main regional concomitants of suicide mortality in Eastern Europe in 1910 were urban living, economic wealth, and divorce, all urban phenomena. In 1989, the main concomitants varied somewhat between the different countries, but homicide, general mortality, and alcohol consumption (in Russia) were often positively related to suicide. The instability of the concomitants to suicide is a consequence of the fact that the nature of suicide in Eastern Europe has changed from being an urban, middle- and upper-class phenomenon into a more conventional social problem, which may be reflected even in the social character of contemporary Eastern European suicide as such. While suicide mortality has to some extent followed lawlessness and alcohol consumption, the changing covariates show that the “social correlates of suicide” are culture-bound and thus flexible. Any ethnic/genetic hypotheses of the distribution of suicide must take this fact into account.