Collateral Source
Definition
Any non-deceased source feeding the reconstruction: family, treating clinician, employer, financial records, diary, digital footprint.
- Context
- Psychological autopsy investigations
- Excludes
- The deceased (a non-deceased source)
- Examples
- Family, clinician, employer, financial or digital records
- Purpose
- Cross-check and corroborate reconstructed history
Common questions
Why are multiple collateral sources used rather than one informant's account?+
A single informant, especially a grieving family member, can unconsciously shape the narrative toward accident or homicide over suicide. Triangulating family, clinical, financial, and digital sources reduces the risk of any one perspective biasing the reconstruction.
What kind of digital footprint counts as a collateral source?+
Search history, messages, social media activity, and app usage in the period before death can corroborate or contradict statements from interviewed sources, and are treated with the same weighing for reliability and potential bias as any other collateral source.
Related terms
- Equivocal Death
- A death in which the cause is established but the manner is unclear. The category that psychological autopsy was originally designed to...
- Manner of Death
- The circumstantial classification of a death using the NAME five-category scheme (natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined), or the jurisdiction-specific equivalent, recorded separately...
- NIMHANS Protocol
- The structured psychological-autopsy interview and source-review framework developed at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru. The Indian de-facto standard.
- Psychological Autopsy
- A retrospective investigation of a deceased person's psychological state in the period before death, used to help differentiate suicide, homicide, accident and...
- Suicide Note
- A written or recorded communication left by the deceased explaining or referring to the act. Present in a minority of Indian suicides;...