Suicide is a major worldwide public health issue. Various studies showed that individual attitudes toward suicide change in a region with high suicide rate. Attitudes are one of the components of a global and complex system: social representations (SRs).

In France, the Brittany region has an abnormally high death rate due to suicides. Our research focuses on the SRs of suicide in this region. The hypothesis underlying this project is that suicide SRs are different between an area with a high suicide rate and a region less affected by suicide.

A comparative study between the Brittany and Alsace regions, with the latter showing a statistically much lower suicide rate. The persons polled responded to a three-word free-association task around the question ‘For you, suicide is ...?’ An analysis of word frequency and evocation rank was then carried out.

In confirmation of our hypothesis, SRs were different between Brittany and the control region.

The study’s results open new avenues of research, specific to Brittany, in terms of the collective or individual effects of suicides, in terms of psycho-pathological conditions – essentially on depression, and in terms of training, on the stereotypes associated with suicide.