ABSTRACT
The role of stress in the suicidal process is well established. At the individual level actual stress interacts with genetic predispositions, personality features and protective factors producing positive or negative outcomes. In modern industrialized societies with a high work load, rapid changes in society, competitiveness, social inequalities and frequent readjustment to new conditions, stress causes a variety of health problems which are mostly psychosomatic by nature or involve mental health. The analysis of this concept presented by the author, who suggests a distinction between the macro, meso and micro-levels as a sociological framework. psycho-social stress should be understood less at the individual level and more at the community level as a response to deprivation, social injustice, inequalities or related events and feelings. In low suicide rate (LSR) countries all of the occurring changes of psycho-social stress that have influenced suicidal behaviour in the Slavic and Baltic ethnicities had no effect, judging from their suicide rates.
