Seasonal Pattern in Suicide in Iran

BACKGROUND: Various studies have shown a seasonal pattern in suicide in the developed societies; however, this pattern is not taken into consideration in most countries including Iran. OBJECTIVES: The current paper studied the seasonal pattern of committing suicide in Northern Iran. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The present study was a longitudinal study with time series features. Subject included suicide attempts recorded by emergency wards of all hospitals in Mazandaran province, Iran. The variable time, in this study, was defined as each month of study years (2005 - 2011), which included 84 monthly time points. To analyze data, the Student’s independent t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) test were used. RESULTS: Of the 14,437 suicide attempts reported during the seven-year period, 5359 (37.1%) were related to males. Suicide attempts reached a peak in June (1418 cases) and November (1352 cases), but were at their lowest level in March (991 cases) (P = 0.877). CONCLUSIONS: The suicide seasonality range is broad in this part of Iran. Moreover, there were two noticeable suicide peaks in June and November.