Note Writers Research Articles

Judging the sex and age of suicide note writers.

Six expert judges were able to guess the age of suicide note writers better than chance but were less successful in guessing the sex.

The moral justification of suicide in suicide notes.

Jacobs (1967) reported a classification of suicide notes into five types: first-form notes (31 25%) try to justify the suicide and seek forgiveness, illness notes (30 4%) in which the writer is suffering from a serious illness, notes which blame orhers for the problems (8.9%), will and testaments, and notes of instruction. No other study has apparently ever applied this classification to a sample of suicide notes. The present study sought to explore the usefulness of Jacobs' classification of suicide notes by seeing whether the 33 pairs of genuine and simulated notes published by Shneidman and Farberow (1957) differed in the types of notes. The 66 notes in the Shneidman and Farberow (1957) sample were classified into Jacobs' five types separately by two experienced suicidologists The interjudge agreement for the classification of the notes was 84 8% An examination of the classifications showed that significantly more of the simulated notes were classified as first-form notes (84.8%) than the genuine notes (63.6%; XZ = 3.88, p < .05). Genuine notes tended more often to be direct accusations, wills, and instructions. It can be seen that suicide notes can be classified into Jacobs' categories with !good reliability but that simulated notes tend to be categorized as first-form notes more frequently than genuine notes. This suggesrs that simulated note writers fail to appreciate that genuine suicide note writers are often angry at significant others and that they have a strong need to leave last instructions.

The suicide notes of young and old people.

A sample of 52 suicide notes (from 48 completed and 4 attempted suicides) were obtained from the police files of a large city and examined to explore differences in the content by age. Subjects had a mean age of 42.2 (SD = 17.3); 35 were males and 17 females. The ages of the note writers were moderately associated with a smaller ratio of verbs of feeling to verbs of action (r = -0.41, two-tailed p = 0.004) and were less explicit in stating suicide as their intention (s = -0.33, p = 0.02) . e age of the noce writer was not associated with the length of the notes (either words, thought units, or words per thought unit), the number of positive, negative, or neutral units or the Discomfort/Relief Quotient (Dollard & Mowrer, 1947), the number of notes, the percent of adjectives relative to verbs, the percent of pronouns or possessive adjectives referring to others rather than the self, the dramatic quality of the notes, the presence of instructions, the mention of suicide in the note, the note being disorganized, or choice of an active versus a passive method for suicide. The only sex differences identified were that the notes of males concained more negative thought units and were rated less often as disorganized. Thus, the notes of older persons tended to be more concerned with feelings rather than accion and less explicit about their forthcoming suicidal action.

Content Analysis of Multiple Messages in Suicide Notes*

ABSTRACT: Two hundred twenty individuals who committed suicide and who left notes, when compared with 813 non‐note writers, were significantly more likely to be white, female, and, if female, to have any other marital status than “widowed.” With respect to method, the results indicated that note writers were more apt to have committed suiced with “Drugs” and less apt to have used “Other” methods. The question is raised as to whether or not note writers can be accepted as representative of the whole group of those who commit suicide. In 195 suicide notes for which content was available for analysis, the relative percentages of statements containing advice, instructions, and requests (31), other‐directed positive affect (19), acknowledgment of wrongdoing (7), and hostile affect (5) were the same in the entire sample as in subsamples of age, sex, and marital status. Only for a few specific content categories did the relative frequency of content vary significantly with age, sex, or marital status. Advantages of the present method of content analysis are discussed, and suggestions for further research in this area are offered.

A comparison of single and multiple note writers among suicides.

A comparison of single and multiple note writers among suicides.