Suicide in Artists: National Epidemiology (IN: Suicide and the Creative Arts, edited by S Stack & D Lester)

This chapter begins with the delineation of a sociological model of occupation & suicide & the application of the model to the case of artistic occupations. The model has 4 major components: demographics, internal occupational stress, pre-existing psychiatric morbidity, & opportunity factors. Aspects of the model are tested in three studies. Study 1 tests Preti & Motto’s hypothesis that occupational strain varies among different categories of artists & that these categories will have different levels of suicide risk. Study 2 seeks demographic & occupational variables that best differentiate artist suicide from all other deaths of artists. Study 3 expands the analysis to the total population of deaths in 1990. (46 refs.)