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Patterns Of Suicide And Self-Harm In Pakistan: A Retrospective Descriptive Study Protocol, Nargis Asad, Summaiya Tariq, Asra Qureshi, Mohammad Zaman, Mustafa Aslam, Farhat Mirza, Murad Khan

Brain and Mind Institute

Introduction Suicide is a major global public health problem. Low-income and middle-income countries contribute 78% of all suicidal deaths. Pakistan, a South Asian country, lacks official statistics on suicides at national level. Statistics on suicide are neither collected nationally nor published in the annual national morbidity and mortality surveys. Medicolegal reports on suicides and self-harm are extremely rich and important source of information but greatly underused in Pakistan. We aim to examine the patterns of suicides and self-harm retrospectively in patients who were registered with medicolegal centres (MLCs) in Karachi, during the period January 2017 to December 2021.

Methods and …