노인들의 자살생각과 자살시도에 영향을 미치는 요인

Abstract

Purpose: Nowadays, in this seriously-aging society, seniors in neighborhoods are observed to suffer from any unstable psychological conditions. In that regard, in the concerned study, factors that would influence suicidal ideation of those seniors in Korea were investigated, and in the end, the study proposed basic references to help the society to recognize the importance of the mental health of the elderly and to encourage the seniors to live a healthy life via the mental stability and the mental enrichmentof their own. Subject and Method: The study selected a total of 3,076 seniors at the age of 65 and older as primary research participants. The 3,076 research participants were those who were first picked from a group of 17,476 seniors that had participated in the fifth health survey in the year of 2010-2011 which was carried out to understand physical conditions and nutritional status of the public. Those 2,792 seniors of the 3,076 primary research participants, who have been understood to secure variables necessary for the analysis after their participations in the healthy survey, were determined to be the final research participants. The collected data was processed by IBM SPSS Statistics 21.0 for the descriptive statistic analysis process to understand the general characteristics of the research participants. As for the social-demographic characteristics of the participants, their health behaviors or diagnoses with chronic diseases and how suicidal ideation of the participants, caused by their mental health status, are related to the seniors’ suicidal attempts were analyzed by -test. When cells with the expected frequency of five and less were determined to be 20% and more, the study used values of Fisher‘s Exact Test rather than the values of -test. In order to understand how the variables, which the univariate analysis has considered significantly related, affect the dependent variables, the suicidal ideation and the suicidal attempts, the study conducted the multiple logistic regression analysis and proposed the odds ratio and the confidence interval of 95%. The actual proof analysis of the study was all verified with the significance level of p<0.05. Results: The items concerning the suicidal ideation were observed to be when the participants were female, when they are older, when they do not have spouses, when the level of their education is low, when the gross family income of theirs is low, when they have quitted smoking or are still smoking, when they have high blood pressure, when they get aware of their being stressed out more easily than others and when they feel depressed for two weeks and longer in a row. Not only that, the aged were considered to try for a suicide more easily when they were male, when they have had a sense of depression for more than two consecutive weeks, when they have received psychotherapy for the last one year and when they have thought of killing them selves. Conclusion: Since the suicidal ideation are considered to cause the suicidal attempts, it is necessary to conduct analytic researches on the topic only constantly. The concerned study has confirmed how often the elderly in Korea would think of committing a suicide and how urgent it is for Korea to come up with multidirectional projects to prevent the elderly from the suicidal ideas. The concerned study is now believed to make a contribution to protecting the seniors in Korea from committing a suicide and to reduce the suicidal ideation of theirs as the study intervenes in those factors which have been determined to be dangerous enough to lead the elderly to any suicidal ideation or suicidal attempts.