What is Suicide? Will Suicidologists Ever Agree?

Abstract

51 students and 20 experts judged 20 behaviors which might be considered to be suicide in a similar fashion with the exception that the experts were less likely to see a dog who refuses to eat and dies as a suicide. Applying models proposed for how people categorize objects, it is argued that both experts and lay people use a prototypical approach rather than a feature comparison approach for defining suicide.