SUMMARY

Suicide is a universal human phenomenon that has always been present in every historical period. Notwithstanding, the attitude towards the suicidal conduct has been different regarding each culture’s philosophical, religious and intellectual principles. The concept of suicide itself has changed through time due to the diversity of focuses and orientations that have handled its study from Sociology to Psychiatry. Suicide is one of the most frequent death causes.

Regarding the estimations from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1500000 people will die by suicide, and the number of people that will carry out a suicidal attempt will be 10 to 20 times higher. The research on suicide has not been successful at finding a common etiology of the suicidal conducts, but some risk factors undoubtedly linked to this kind of conducts have been identified. Some suicide risk factors are, among others, sociodemographical ones like gender and age, or socioeconomical ones, as well as those related to biology, the genetic predisposal or the presence of physical or mental disorders. Depression is the main factor responsible for completed suicides, both when it comes to depressed patients and to those with another main diagnosis presenting a comorbid depressive symptomatology. In the last years, several explanatory models of the suicidal conduct that try to harmonize the above exposed findings whose suicidal conduct explanatory axis is the relation between neurochemical disfunctions and certain psychopathological dimensions, like depression and anxiety, have come to light. Even though it is very unlikely to prevent these behaviours, there are some measures that can be applied in a healthcare environment, both through the primary and the specialized health care, that can be of help in the difficult task of preventing this kind of behaviours. An adequate treatment of depression appears to be the best preventive measure against the suicidal conducts. Nowadays, although enough data from clinical essays and several metaanalysis regarding the beneficial effect of the treatment with antidepressive agents on the suicidal conducts exist, a controversy that focuses on a possible increase of the suicidal ideas/conducts in teenagers and adults following a treatment with antidepressive agents has been borne. However, groups of experts agree to highlight that, when the illness symptoms and signals are enough to require the use of antidepressive, ansiolitic or antipsychotic medication, there is no reason to deprive these patients of their potential benefits.