[Suicide in ethnic and cultural minorities - a research on literature]

Abstract

Suicide plays an important role in the history of civilization. For health, moral, cultural, social and psychological reasons it exhibits an impressive phenomenon all over the world. From a sociological point of wiev globalization leads to migration and enlarges ethnic minorities. Thus it influences the suicide risk of ethnicities - usually in different terms for both genders. Our review is based on data from a few countries. Found protective or risk factors refer to specific minorities and cannot implicitly be generalized. Poor methodological preciseness regards varying definitions of minority, ethnicitiy and immigrant as well as the heterogeneous description of interactions between minority and host country, of social inclusion and cultural peculiarities. On the other hand ethnic aspects involved in suicide are so relevant that they have to be explored as exactly as possible.