The Daily Bulletin Archive

Taronish Irani, licensed psychologist in the Counseling Center, is the coauthor of a newly published book, Explaining Suicide: Patterns, Motivations, and What Notes Reveal (Academic Press, 2017).

The rate of suicide across all age groups except the elderly is at its highest level in nearly 30 years. Suicide notes have long been thought to be valuable resources for understanding suicide motivation, but up to now, the small sample sizes available have made in-depth analysis difficult. This book represents the first large-scale analysis of suicide motivation across multiple ages in the same period. This was made possible via a unique dataset of all suicide notes collected by the coroner’s office in southwestern Ohio from 2000 to 2009.