Abstract

GARCIA PEREZ, Teresita. La autopsia psicológica en el suicidio. Med. leg. Costa Rica [online]. 1998, vol.15, n.1-2, pp.22-24. ISSN 2215-5287.

The term "suicide" defined by Shneidman as "the human act of auto-injury with the intention of finishing", it extends an infinity of motivational states conscious or unconsciously. What is a psychologic autopsy ? Is the retrospective characterization of the personality and the life of a deceased, using, of course, an indirect or differencial method, is about obtaining information of the deceased through third people that had intimate links with the dead during it's lifetime. The psychologic autopsy as a pericial technique, sees the light for the first time in the seventeenth's, in Los Angeles, California, as an exit to the administrating need of defining the medico-legal etiology of doubtful deaths in which there was not enough elements to affirmate if they were dealing with a suicide or an accidental death. PartIng from the antecedents and previous check up of all the models, scales, guides and formularies, we build a particular model named MAP-I (psychologic autopsy model of suicidal persons), that differs from the previous models (that were open and semi-structured), this particular one completely structured and sistematized, in a way that is lowered to the minimun the margen of sesgo, given that all the explorers have to do the exploration the same way, leading themselves by an instructive to the MAP-I, with the possibility of a closed answer, to avoid the involvement of elements that are subjective to the value of each case , and also to verify it by the third people and therefor guarantee its value as a pericial evidence. There exists the false popular belief that an individual that commmits suicide does not tell anybody of its intentions and we prove that that is a wrong belief, totally false given that more than one-third of the studied individuals made verbalizations were they announced what they were going to do, being this pessimistic comments about their future, dispair, and the expression of feelings of loneliness, inutility,incapability or incompetence this being the most frequent warning signs found in our study.

Keywords : MAP-I; autopsy; suicide; characterization; retrospective; personality; risk; profile; prevention; suicidal victim.