Suicide attempts with higher lethality increase the likelihood of suicide completion. Accumulating knowledge on risk factors contributing to higher suicide lethality may help clinicians to allocate their limited resources to more endangered people.

To explore the factors associated with higher lethality in suicide attempts.

All suicide attempters, who visited the emergency department of Uijeongbu St. Mary's hospital from January 2014 to December 2015, were reviewed retrospectively. We compared between the high vs. the low lethality group, of which had been recorded based on clinical judgment using t-test or Chi²/Fisher's exact test with two-sided P-value of 0.05.

Among the 753 suicide attempters, the assessed lethality was recorded in 736 cases. Low and highly lethal attempters were 426 (57.9%) and 310 (42.1%), respectively. For demographic variables, the high lethality attempters were significantly more likely to be older (48.3 vs. 44.78; P=0.009), unemployed (61.0% vs. 56.5%; P=0.042, without religion (90.9% vs. 84.9%; P=0.017). For clinical variables, the high lethality attempters were significantly more likely have hopelessness (67.7% vs. 58.2%; P=0.013) and a history of schizophrenia (4.5% vs. 1.4%; P=0.023, while they did display any difference for mood disorders. The low lethality suicide attempts were more frequent in patients with comorbid personality disorders (9.2% vs. 4.9%; P=0.031).

These results are in line with literatures reporting higher suicide risk in people, who are old, unemployed, not having a religion, psychotic and hopeless. These may have been moderated by committing a higher lethal means of suicide at least in part and warrants additional investigations.