Responsibility of Hospital and Psychiatrist

SUICIDE IS NOW THE TENTH GREATEST CAUSE of death in the UnitedStates. It has become an increasingly larger factor statistically, because, as other causes of death come under medical control, the prevalence of suicide becomes more noticeable. In the last ten years, at the very minimum, two-hundred thousand (200,000) Americans have killed themselves, and in all likelihood, more Americans have died in the last twenty years at their own hands than were killed in World War II and the Korean War combined. It is also possible that suicides outnumber those killed in automobile accidents as is clearly the case in England.2 Thus the problem of suicide is a prominent public health problem in this country. Physicians and hospitals have an obvious concern, as do the law courts, where actions for wrongful death and negligence may involve suicide as a result of a tortious act. An example of the extremes reached in law was