thx for reply
that is exactly where these clusters come from :]
You may consider using this program http://www.satscan.org/techdoc.html. I believe it is made for this type of analysis, but I have never used it. Scanning through the documentation it seems it can be used without controls and just cases.
Any sort of clustering statistic is subject to scale and boundary. I assume you will address these in your talk.
i'm trying to figure out method for displaying clusters along with underlying population.. that is what Hans also suggested above and I'll se what i can do about it
You may also consider using a Kernel Density Estimation surface, which will help identify hotspots of suicide as opposed to clusters. If you present this with a KDE surface of population, you might be able to demonstrate that suicide hotspots are in different areas from population hotspots. CrimeStat has KDE tools. KDE is dependent on bandwidth selection, but you might consider variable bandwidth for this type of data.