Asian Journal of Nursing Education and Research

Psychological autopsy is a procedure used to identify equivocal deaths. An equivocal death is a death in which it is not immediately clear whether a person committed suicide or not (eg.drug ingestion deaths, single car accident deaths).It is basically a mental status examination of deceased. In augmentation, information is gathered from available health care, psychiatric records and forensic examination. Thus a psychological autopsy synthesizes the information from manifold informants and records. The early generation of psychological autopsies rooted that more than 90% of completed suicides had suffered from usual co-morbid mental disorders, most of them clinically diagnosed to have mood and substance use disorders. Furthermore, they disclosed that under treatment of these mental disorders without any contact with psychiatric or other health care services might be the reason for committed suicide.