Young male suicide attempters 20 years later: the suicide mortality rate

In a 20-year, register-based follow-up of a group of 51 young male conscripts who had made a suicide attempt during their service, 2 were found to have committed suicide during the follow-up period. These figures gave a 20-year accumulated suicide mortality of 3.92%, whereas the corresponding value in the cohort of Norwegian males who reached the age of 20 in the period 1968-1972 was 0.40%. In spite of this clear difference, the study indicates that the long-term suicide mortality is relatively low for young suicide-attempters in this type of setting compared to figures from other follow-up studies.