Common agents used in parasuicide in Buffalo City
Abstract
Background. Parasuicide is a serious public health concern.Understanding the methods used will help in developing preventive strategies.
Objective. To investigate the agent(s) used in parasuicide
attempts by individuals aged 10 - 20 years in Buffalo City (which includes the municipalities of East London, King William’s Town and Bhisho in the Eastern Cape).
Method. All referrals for parasuicide to the East London Mental
Health Unit, the only mental health facility servicing Buffalo
City, for the period January 2006 to December 2008 were analysed with regard to age, agent(s), number of attempts and psychiatric disorder.
Results. Of 1 169 patients referred after parasuicide by ingestion of substances, 360 (31%) were between the ages of 10 and 20 years. Eighty-three per cent were female and 17% male. Cattle dip was the commonest agent used, followed by amitriptyline.
Conclusion. The study showed that organophosphates were the commonest agent used in parasuicide in Buffalo City and that the incidence of parasuicide was higher in females than in males.
http://www.sajp.org.za/index.php/sajp/pages/view/policies#part_4
Copyright
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose.
AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
