[Dementia, suicide attempts and suicide. A case study]

The prevalence of suicide or attempts to suicide in patients with any sort of dementia has not been sharply established. The only figures found through a bibliographic search on Medline belong to a paper by Larson (13) dated 1963, who points out that only 0,8 per cent of men and 0,3 per cent of women suffering dementia commit suicide. Although persons over 65 years old are less than the 13 per cent of the world total population, they actually commit between the 17 per cent and the 25 per cent of all the suicides. Usually it was claimed that people with dementia do not commit suicide, on one hand, because of the failure in the executive abilities and in the capability to carry it on, and due to the lost of insight, on the other, both of them acting as protective factors. The aim of this article is to analyse the five clinical cases of patients with dementia that were hospitalized in a psychiatric service of a general hospital after trying to commit suicide, and then compare these cases with other four cases of patients with dementia that commit suicide reported in the international literature.