ABSTRACT
Edwin Shneidman and the early team agreed that many informants were needed. The mental state of the informant is also never stated; if that person was depressed or grief-stricken, of course, the information would be colored by what the informant sees. After the interviews were completed, the informants were asked to provide names and addresses of other knowledgeable informants. Identifying information about the deceased and the informants have been altered in the publication process in order to protect anonymity. The purpose and the procedure of the study were repeated to informants when they were contacted by telephone and prior to commencing the interview. Parents of young suicides may be the least informed ones, and yet many psychological autopsy (PA) studies rely on just parents as informants of their grown-up children's suicides. Despite the PA literature's focus to date, rarely did the informant assign the blame to the person's mental health problems.
