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Across the 10 westerly and 6 easterly states of Germany, better-than-average school-end grades, taken as a proxy for intelligence, corresponded to higher regional suicide rates. This finding adds to similar evidence from other countries (Austria, Belarus, British Isles, Denmark, Netherlands, and USA), suggestive of positive ecologic (group-level) associations between indicators for cognitive ability and suicide prevalence, whilst offsetting prior inconclusive evidence for Germany from Voracek (2006) on the same question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional intelligence proxies (intranational average domain scores from the PISA 2000 and 2003 studies) were not reliably associated with the suicide rate across the states of Germany, thereby not replicating findings of a positive ecological correlation of regional intelligence and suicide prevalence from other within-nation studies (Austria, Belarus, the British Isles, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the USA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]