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BACKGROUND: This article presents epidemiological and clinical findings from the Basel research centre parti­cipating in the WHO/EURO Multicentre Study on Suicidal Behaviour. METHODS: Between January 2003 and December 2006, 984 suicide attempts were documented for patients presenting at medical institutions with a suicide attempt. RESULTS: The mean suicide attempt rate was 164/100,000 inhabitants. Women attempted suicide nearly twice as often as men. The highest suicide attempt rates were found for women aged 20–24 years, for men aged 30–34 years, and for people who were unmarried, of foreign nationality, and of low education or low employment status. ‘Soft methods’ were used significantly more often than ‘hard methods’. Of the suicide attempt methods employed, a relatively high proportion was accounted for by self-poisoning with drugs (X60-64), especially with non­steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, benzodiazepines and antidepressants. Significant gender differences were found in the various methods and in the frequency of psychiatric diagnoses. A total of 98.7% of the attempters were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder according to ICD-10; 35% suffered from an affective disorder. Men were significantly more frequently affected by substance abuse disorder or psychosis, whereas in women adjustment disorders and personality disorders were diagnosed significantly more often. CONCLUSIONS: This study offers the first published representative data of an entire Swiss county. Established sociodemographic and clinical risk factors for suicide attempts were reproduced. The identification of risk factors contributes to developing local targeted prevention strategies, for example education of risk groups and caregivers, and pharmacolegal consequences for package sizes. Gender- and age-specific prevention and aftercare programmes are indicated.

QUESTIONS UNDER STUDY: Suicidal behaviour is a major source of burden of disease. While most studies focus on cost associated with completed suicides, data on costs of, non-lethal, suicide attempts are lacking. The aim of this study was to assess direct annual cost of suicide attempts in Basel in 2003 from a health services perspective. METHODS: Retrospective cost-of-illness-study of the Basel cohort of the 2003 WHO/EURO-Multicentre Study on Parasuicide. We extracted cost information from the two major hospitals involved in treatment of these patients. We determined overall cost, compared cost medians and identified variables associated with higher cost by means of logistic regression. RESULTS: For 2003, treatment of suicide attempters in Basel’s main hospitals amounted to 3,373,025 Swiss Francs (CHF), mainly attributable to psychiatric care. Mean and median cost per case were 19,165 CHF and 6,108 CHF, respectively. Based on these findings, the extrapolated direct medical costs for medical treatment of suicide attempts in Switzerland per year amount to 191 million CHF. Parameters associated with high costs were age above 65 (p