I have been quiet in my blog for a while. In four books, I reviewed everything n suicide from 1897 to 1997. In retirement, I have been trying to catch up. I no longer try to review everything. I use only PsycInfo and Sociological Abstracts. I started with 1998 and now I am working on articles published in 2009.
It is depressing. Research studies continually discover what we already knew. Alcohol drinking, child abuse, depression etc predicts suicide. Part 1 of my undergraduate degree at Cambridge University was in science. Chemists are no longer publishing articles that show that, if you burn hydrogen in oxygen, the result is water. Why are we publishing the same findings year after year after year?
I found that the first study linking childhood abuse (sexual and physical) to suicidal behavior was published in 1986. I found that the same association was documented in research published in 2024. Forty years of reporting the same association.
The social sciences are certainly not sciences!
