ABSTRACT
Originally, Edwin Shneidman's psychological autopsy (PA) was designed to assist medical examiners and coroners in classifying deaths that were equivocal; the deaths were ambiguous or undetermined. Somewhere along the way, the PA became the primary approach in studying risk factors. L. Pouliot and D. De Leo note that the PA approach has offered an opportunity to provide people with a great deal of information on suicide, such as psychiatric disorder/mental illness, childhood histories, life events, protective factors, and the like. The systematic review of nomothetic PA studies by Cavanagh et al. is often cited by researchers who believe it is true that suicide is most strongly associated with only mental disorders. The researchers who use standardized questionnaires with proxies cite it always; it says what they believe. From the beginning, Shneidman took his identification as a clinical psychologist seriously and believed that the main endpoint or goal of the clinical enterprise understands a needful person.
