WVU in the News: Death by suicide? Drug overdoses muddy waters for investigators
Classifying a death as suicide may be easiest for medical examiners and coroners in the western United States, which reports the highest suicide rates officially. Suicide by firearm is the leading method there, and usually clear in terms of evidence.
By contrast, suicides by drug overdose, spurred primarily by the opioid epidemic in the remainder of the country, are less obvious to investigators.
But a new West Virginia University-led injury mortality study combines most drug overdose deaths with all suicides into an expanded self-injury category. Exposing a mental health crisis that has unraveled across the United States over the past two decades, study data have direct implications for suicide prevention efforts.
Ian Rockett, professor emeritus of epidemiology in the WVU School of Public Health, spearheaded the research that examined fatal self-injury in the United States from 1999 to 2018. Measuring self-injury mortality (SIM)—suicides plus estimated "non-suicide" drug self-intoxication deaths--circumvents suicide misclassification and more accurately accounts for fatal self-injuries.