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Sammanfattning

In his influential work Durkheim rejected drinking as a plausible causal factor for suicide. This may be one reason why the alcohol factor was long neglected in sociological suicide research. However, recent decades have witnessed a growing number of studies on the population level where the issue is how changes in alcohol consumption affect the suicide rate. The present article provides an overview of the research published in this area after 1989. Through searches of MedLine and Social Sciences Citation Index supplemented by manual searches 42 relevant studies were identified. Most (34) of the 42 studies present gender-specific estimates of the relationship between alcohol consumption and suicide. Of these, 53 % were significantly positive for males, and 37 % for females. No study reported a significant negative relationship. There is a distinct cultural variation in the strength of the relationship: it tends to be stronger the more the country's drinking patterns are geared towards binge drinking. It is concluded that the studies represent a broadening of the suicide research (by including the alcohol factor) as well as alcohol epidemiological research (by broadening the outcome panorama from somatic to social harm). However, most studies are based on data from developed Western countries. Future studies should include a broader range of countries.

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