In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

198 8 Profiles in Suicide Looking at such an exceptionally high number of suicides, one is tempted to draw conclusions and define a pattern that would hold for the whole population . Is there one typical profile of the suicide victim? Is there one variable or dimension that overrides all others? One would like to come up with a quick answer to the question of why people commit suicide so often. But inevitably in Palawan as elsewhere, the student of suicide and suicidal behavior is confronted with a complicated situation. Not all suicides are the same. People kill themselves, apparently, at least, for a great variety of reasons. Personality traits differ widely from one case to another. The people from Kulbi are no exception to this truth. Not being able to provide one simple answer that fits all, one goes to the next stage and seeks partial answers. Are there cases that bear a family resemblance to each other? If so, could one define “profiles” or “types” based on recurring variables? This is the beginning of the slippery road to typology building , an endeavor exposed to the risk of ending up with as many types as there are individual cases. This is nevertheless what the following section attempts to do, because this is the obvious way to start organizing the data and sort out facts into manageable clusters providing the dimensions on which an interpretation can be based. The starting point is the definition of variables. In table 11 below, 10 such variables have been culled from field data. From there, and within the sample of documented cases, one proceeds to ask questions such as, Are there any variables that remain constant? Which status variables are most often associated with suicide cases? Do suicides follow a seasonal pattern? Is suicide related to violence or homicide? These and other questions will be examined in the course of chapter 9. I will, however, proceed in two steps. After a quick examination of the overall rate of suicide for the Kulbi population, I shall survey the rate of occurrences of single variables and see what this will yield and whether some conclusions can be 8. p rof i le s in su icide 199 drawn from such a one-dimensional, single-variable analysis. In the second step, I shall endeavor to establish profiles from a number of variables taken together in clusters. This multidimensional analysis will enable us, hopefully, to gain depth and evaluate the psychodynamic processes and personality types behind suicidal events. This will lead us to further examine these findings against the backdrop of the Kulbi cultural context, with a view to developing an anthropological explanation of suicide. The reference sample is provided by 87 cases listed in table 11, with 10 variables for each named case: age, sex, year,1 reason, method, place, marital status, clustering or multiple suicide, homicide, and social environment. Each of these variables will be carefully examined in the following paragraphs. More details on the cases listed are provided in chapter 7. Table 11 has been sorted by year, chronologically, from 1945 onward.2 General Statistics for Kulbi Figure 19 provides an overview of the actual number of cases per year of completed suicides over a period of 25 years, from January 1978 to March 2002, this being the period for which accurate and complete data were gathered for Kulbi proper. Cases collected for the period 1945 to 1977 (see table 11) do not form an equally reliable set, and there are too many uncertainties to put them on the same footing as the post-1978 data. Let me note that I collected systematic data on suicide in 1989 only and that the memories of my informants were shallow enough to make any accurate projection on a period before 1978 highly questionable . The 24 or 25 cases retrieved for the 1945–1978 period show that in spite of its gross underestimated rate, occurrences of suicide during this period were already very high, comparatively speaking, and that suicide was in no conceivable way an entirely new phenomenon in the 1970s. Informants agree also that suicide was a common practice in old times, even if they could not give names and point to individual cases. Figure 19 shows that over the period covered, between one and five people killed themselves each year, with the exception of 1978. That year’s peak number is partly accounted for, according to informants, by an...

Share