The MTS act and suicide (2)

The MTS act and suicide (1)

To begin with, how much is the suicide rate of Japanese?
It can be calculated easily.

There are 32,249 people committed suicide in 2008 according to the Cabinet Office, the government of Japan.
And, the population in Japan was 127,692,000 in 2008.
Therefore, the Japanese suicidal rate was 0.025 % in 2008.

The next question is how much is the suicide rate of the people with mental disorders.

The World Health Organization (WHO) comments that 90 % of the people committed suicide have some mental disorders at the time of suicide. This idea is widely supported.

However, this was not authorized in Japan traditionally. Some researchers claimed that a lot of Japanese tend to commit suicide with his or her own belief, not due to mental disorders. They referred to "hara-kiri", an ancient custom, with which Japanese Samurai killed himself to compensate his critical fault. So it was assumed that the rate of complication with mental disorders in suicide cases was lower in Japan than in other western countries.

But this hypothesis seems to be wrong.

Mr. Yoshinori Choh has accomplished a survey with psychological autopsy to investigate the suicide cases in Japan. As a result, 89 % of the cases were suffering from mental disorders, also in Japan. His study is very comprehensive and reliable.

Amazon.co.jp: Why does human commit suicide? -- Evidence from psychological autopsy (in Japanse)

After all, about 90 % of the suicide cases have some mental disorders in Japan. Therefore, 29024 people with mental disorders died by themselves in 2008 in Japan.

On the other hand, there are about 3,257,000 people with mental disorders in Japan, according to the patient survey in 2008.

So the suicide rate of the people with mental disorders in Japan is calculated to 0.9 % in a year.
It is surprising that almost 1 % of the patients with mental disorders kill themselves in a year, isn't it? I am frightened to imagine some patients in my clinic would commit suicide every year.

(To be continued)