Suicide as a medical education curricular topic: a documentary analysis of Brazilian federal medical schools
Journal of Public Mental Health
ISSN: 1746-5729
Article publication date: 12 January 2022
Issue publication date: 19 May 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Physicians worldwide need to be able to identify and assess suicide risk or behavior in their consults. The proper training of medical staff is an important form of suicide prevention, especially because 80% of the patients who died by suicide were in contact with a health-care service in the year of their death. The purpose of this study is to verify if some of the most important Brazilian medical schools includes discussions regarding suicide in their curricula, and describe them.
Design/methodology/approach
The study performed a documentary analysis of all Brazilian federal higher education institutions. The analysis involved selecting the institutions that approached the topic of suicide in their curricula, and sorting it by keywords. The curricula that contained such keywords were then entirely read, analyzed and all components found were described regarding course period, workload and approach.
Findings
Within the 68 analyzed institutions, 19 (28%) included suicide in their curricula with a total of 31 components approaching suicide among them. Those components belonged to different stages of the course and had different workloads and approaches. A total of seven different approaches were identified: Clinical (54.8%); Emergency (16.1%); Medical Psychology (9.7%); Ethics (6.5%); Social (6.5%); Occupational (3.2%) and Forensic (3.2%).
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first to address medical education regarding suicide in a large number of Brazilian institutions. It is also one of the few studies worldwide to quantify suicide discussion on a large number of institutions using documentary analysis.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Theo Aguiar Jesuino for proof-reading this article.
Funding: The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Citation
Aguiar Jesuino, T., Camelier-Mascarenhas, M., Santos Ferreira, T., Barreto de Farias, J., de Oliveira Lima, L. and Santos Oliveira, I.M. (2022), "Suicide as a medical education curricular topic: a documentary analysis of Brazilian federal medical schools", Journal of Public Mental Health, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 143-151. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMH-07-2021-0087
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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