Suicide shows cross-cultural roots.

Major depression and alcoholism play an important role in suicides in Taiwan, just as they do in North America and Europe, according to a report in the July Archives of General Psychiatry.

"Despite widely different rates of depressive illness and alcoholism in different cultures, the psychiatric antecedents of suicide are the same in the East and the West," contends Andrew T.A. Cheng, a psychiatrist at Academia Sinica in Taipei. Chinese communities report much lower rates of depression and alcoholism than Western nations.

Cheng directed psychiatric interviews of close relatives and friends of 113 people, each belonging to one of three ethnic groups in eastern Taiwan, who killed themselves in the period from July 1989 to December 1991. For each suicide, Cheng's team also interviewed two randomly selected people of the same sex and age who lived in the same area.

Evidence of prior mental illness emerged for all but two of the suicide victims. The other 111 had most often suffered from major depression and alcoholism or drug abuse. A family history of suicide or depression also appeared to be linked closely to suicide, as it is in the United States and elsewhere.

The new study "reveals a more universal nature of suicide than could previously have been assumed," Cheng argues.