: it may be protective in
circumstances where a given faith expressly forbids suicide or it may be permissive of
suicide. Religious, legal, and cultural factors also affect the willingness to report a death as a
suicide and contribute to the under-reporting and misclassification of suicides which, as we
have seen in Chapter 1, are significant in a number of the participating countries. Taken
together, these social factors may be more salient as risk and protective factors for suicide
than they are in Europe or the United States of America.
Socio-economic, cultural, and religious characteristics of the countries
participating in the Strategies to Prevent Suicide (STOPS) project appear to play a
role in the epidemiological profile of suicide described in Chapter 1. In some cases,
these factors may have a direct influence on rates of completed and attempted suicide
(e.g., when a country’s religion forbids suicide). In other cases, they may have an
indirect influence in that they contribute to the degree to which people acknowledge
their own suicidal behaviour and/or that of individuals in their families, and
consequently affect the accuracy of official suicide statistics. The current chapter
outlines the key socio-economic, cultural and religious factors identified by the
STOPS project.