Abstract

A retrospective study was conducted at Swami Ramanand Teerth Government Rural Medical College, Ambajogai which is a rural based tertiary care hospital where all deaths near places were carried out for post mortem examination. The study duration was period between January 2011 December 2015. The prime objective of the study was to project the changes in methods/trends of suicides in rural marathwada region as hanging ranked as a leading method of suicide in spite of poisoning and others as well as to evaluate the magnitude of problem within the area of study and to determine the relevant factors associated with hanging cases.In the study, total 620 postmortem cases of hanging victims which were reported by and to government authority regarding deaths included in farmer’s suicide. The nature of hanging in all the cases was suicide. Males constituted 70.3% of the cases. Age wise, 55.48 % of cases fell within 2040 years. Family disputes were the most common factor cited as the reason for the act in 52.2% of cases. Most of the subjects were married (76.7%) and with relation to studies, 55.2% were educated. With regards to occupation, 41.93% cases constituted farmers. 54.8% cases hailed from rural area. As with the time of hanging, in 52.9% of the cases, the incidence happened between 12 AM – 6 AM and the place of incidence was farm house in 93.5% of cases. With the choice of ligature material, synthetic ligature material (47.74%) was the most commonly used ligature material by hanging victims. There are many similarities and differences were seen during this study.

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