Suicidal areas: Cluster analysis profiles of urban environments

Abstract

For a 12 year period from 1966–1977 epidemiological data on attempted suicide will be presented for the city of Mannheim, Germany. In the line with Durkheim's theory of social disintegration within the tradition of ecological studies like Faris & Dunham's“Mental Illness in Urban Area” or Sainsbury's“Suicide in London”, we have done an ecological study on attempted suicide in Mannheim. The ecological study was based on the level of municipal wards, on the level of smaller enumeration districts and even on the level of streets and small neighborhood areas.As the results of the eclogical study it was found that the strength and the direction of correlations between attempted suicide rates and ecological properties of social disintegration varied with the level of the ecological unit. At the level of streets and small neighborhoods a high concentration of attempted suicide was found. Within the street with the highest rate any 10th inhabitant has attempted suicide within the 12 years’ period. The cluster analysis profiles show two types of areas with high rates of attempted suicide, where both, social anomie and social disintegration, are high.