Administered psychological assessments & collected demographic data from 20 male Ss who made suicide threats, 21 male parasuicides & 21 male Ss who made life-threatening attempts. Results suggest that a suicidal process was set in motion due to a combination of several factors. Life-threatening attemptors were more likely to have experienced a prior attempt & a recent major loss. A view of suicide as a process implies that medical lethality neither reveals nor determines psychiatric lethality.