General health status in a cohort of Iranian patients with intentional self poisoning: a preventive approach

ABSTRACT

Prevention of suicide is one of the most important issues of community medicine in the world. Because of high accessibility of people to different drugs in our society, one of the easiest ways of suicide is intentional self poisoning. In this study, demographic factors and health status of the patients with intentional self poisoning were evaluated. A cross sectional study was conducted in the poisoning referral center on 384 patients aged 15-40 years who committed intentional self poisoning. Information was gathered using two questionnaires about demographic characteristics and the general health status of the patients. 70.5% of the patients had easy accessibility to drugs. Most of the patients were women [62.5%] and single [51%]. History of psychological disease was demonstrated in 82.5% of patients. In terms of general health status, the most common problems were social dysfunction [97.57%] and depression [88.9%]. Easy accessibility to drugs and psychological problems may increase the risk of intentional self poisoning. Being religious and the consequent hopefulness may have a positive protecting effect for the prevention of intentional self-poisoning