• Few attempts have been made to look for potential correlations between psychiatric diagnoses and psychosocial stressors in suicides. In this study, we examine relationships between the most common psychiatric illnesses and the most common stressors in 283 suicides from San Diego County. We found that interpersonal loss/conflicts occurred more frequently near the time of death for substance abusers with and without depression than for persons with “pure” affective disorder. These findings are consistent with those of previous reports, suggesting a difference between the way suicidal persons with substance abuse and pure affective disorder respond to certain external stressors.