Psychological autopsy–A need of the future

The “psychological autopsy” is a procedure for investigating a person's death by reconstructing what the person thought, how he felt when he was alive prior to his/her death & afterwards died. This reconstruction is based upon various information gathered from personal documents, police reports, medical records and face-to-face interviews with families, friends and others who were in direct touch with the person prior to his death. Although it has been widely used all over the world for helping death investigations and other purposes, but in our country the idea is still in its infancy & only limited to sporadic research activities. We propose a systematic and standardized approach for development of psychological autopsy in our country, which will be of immense help in complete investigation of deaths especially in suicide cases.