Specificities of mental health problems in the countries of the Maghreb region, through scientific publications on the theme of suicide. A systematic review

Abstract

Background: In an article published in the journal "La Tunisie médicale" in 1972, Professor Sleim Ammar, a visionary North African psychiatrist, announced that "suicide is a public health problem" in the Maghreb.

Objectives: This work, on the one hand, aims to describe the profile of Maghreb publications indexed in the Medline database, on the topic of suicide during the last forty years, and on the other hand to extract the Maghreb specificities of the epidemiology and the suicide management, used as tracer of Maghreb mental health.

Methods: This is a systematic medical review, combined with a bibliometric study, on the theme of "suicide" in Maghreb region. We submitted a distinct and clear search term to the Medline database, via its online interface, "PubMed", on May 16, 2018. In addition to the description of the bibliometric characteristics of these Maghreb studies, we synthesized the analysis of their content by tables detailing the documented facts and recommended proposals.

Results: Out of 32 Maghreb articles on suicide, selected for this literature review, 18 were Moroccan and 13 were Tunisian. Two-thirds of them published after 2010. The snapshot of Maghreb research indexed on Medline, on suicide, was the following: a publication written in French, focused on the attempts of suicide, with a monocentric and descriptive methodological approach, written by a psychiatry team and published in an "open access" African journal. The recommendations of these North African publications on suicide were often general and not operational.

Conclusion: the North African scientific research on suicide remains unproductive and of low methodological quality. The focus of this research towards primary suicide prevention, as part of a comprehensive public health approach, would be essential for the promotion of mental health in the North African region.