psychological autopsy
an analysis that is conducted following a person’s death to reconstruct his or her mental state prior to dying. Psychological autopsies are often performed when a death occurs in a complex, ambiguous, or equivocal (unexplained) manner to determine if the death was the result of natural causes, accident, homicide, or suicide. Attention is given to the total course of the individual’s life to ascertain the facts, motivations, and meanings associated with the death. Also called equivocal death analysis; reconstructive psychological evaluation. [pioneered in the 1970s by U.S. psychologists Edwin S. Shneidman and Norman L. Farberow and medical examiner Theodore J. Murphy at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center]