Hangings in Newfoundland and Labrador: A 40‐year retrospective analysis of medical examiner data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A comprehensive review of medical examiner data was undertaken of all hanging deaths in the Canadian Maritime province of Newfoundland and Labrador from 1982 to 2021. A total of 811 cases were identified representing suicidal, accidental, and undetermined manners of death. Variables examined included age; sex; seasonality; ligature type; location; time since death; prior attempts/suicidal ideation; presence/absence of a suicide note; and presence/absence of alcohol and drugs. Data subsets were generated, and additional analysis was conducted for hangings involving females; suicidal hangings occurring in the region of Labrador; and those who hanged themselves outdoors. Results indicate that females are choosing to kill themselves by hanging in rapidly increasing numbers. Outdoor suicides by hanging were more common in Newfoundland and Labrador (22.1%) than previously reported in Alberta (11.5%), Texas (5%), and Turkey (12-13%). Unique trends in seasonality were revealed, as were repeated incidents of suicidal clusters. The age distribution was skewed strongly toward youths (10 to 22 years of age), particularly in Labrador. Although Labrador represents only 5% of the total provincial population, it produced 20.1% of the total suicidal hangings in the study. The suicide rate in Canada has decreased by 24% over the past 40 years, yet the rates of suicidal hangings nationally and in Newfoundland and Labrador have increased during the same time period. With a better understanding of the circumstances under which people commit suicide by hanging within the province, it may be possible to target at-risk groups to prevent future cases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".