Helpless against life – tragedy of old age in the shade of suicide

The paper focuses on the reconstruction of the last days of the elderly who attempted suicide. The source material used for the analysis includes suicide notes and comments of persons who had contact with the suicide victim in the last period of life. The adopted method of data operationalisation is a reconstruction which aimed at recreating emotional states, behaviours, or comments particular of people in the last period before the suicide. Based on a description of six cases, various contexts of subjective perception of helplessness were presented as the personal experience of an elderly person. The text presents the analysis of risk factors and mechanisms of suicidal behaviours, taking into account their diverse specificity in the presentation of particular suicide theories. The source