The rates of suicide in the South of Portugal - Algarve - in some years double the country rates.

We will present the results of an on-going research, being carried out with the main purpose of analysing the associations between different risk factors such as depression, hopelessness, pessimism, suicidal ideation, suicidal intentionality and suicidal attempts.

We will study a sample of 60 adults, both males and females, evaluated at the Psychiatric Department of a General Hospital.

We are using a multimodal assessment matrix to evaluate depression, suicidal ideation and intention, and individual, social, and environmental factors commonly related to the onset of major depression, namely hopelessness and pessimism, cognitive processing, interpersonal relations, and life events.

We expect to find a positive correlation between hopelessness and the other studied indicators of suicidal attempts with a different pattern according to gender.