Dictionary:

suicide

  (sū'ĭ-sīd')

Also from Answers.com... Herpes What is Herpes? Learn the signs and symptoms.

1. The act or an instance of intentionally killing oneself.
2. The destruction or ruin of one's own interests: It is professional suicide to involve oneself in illegal practices.
3. One who commits suicide.

[Latin suī, of oneself + –CIDE.]

Current attitudes toward suicide derive from the debates of centuries long past. Aristotle condemned suicide on political grounds, arguing that the allegiance individuals owe to the state precludes them from taking their lives. Plato had likened the state to a parent in the Crito, a position which might seem to support a similar restriction of the individual's right to commit suicide. But Plato actually objected to self- destruction on religious grounds, claiming that human beings are the gods' possessions and risk punishment for daring to decide when to die. Nevertheless, a precedent for the right-to-die position may be found in the Phaedo, where Socrates argues against prolonging life at any cost.

The death of Socrates seemed to embody both reason and self control, qualities prized by the early Stoics, and euthanasia was practised among elderly members of the school. In theory, suicide was an option available to the Stoic at any time. In practice, however, only the first century statesman and philosopher Seneca glorified death to the point of advocating self-destruction as an end in itself. His own death at the command of the emperor Nero was entirely consistent with the principles he espoused. Witnesses described how he managed to stretch the event over the course of a full day, drinking wine and conversing with his friends while periodically opening his veins until he eventually bled to death. Seneca's willingness to end his career in cold blood earned the admiration of his contemporaries — and his was but one of the many heroic suicides that have come down to us from Roman antiquity. The legends of Lucretia, Cato, Brutus, Portia, Antony, and Cleopatra became models for the suicide of honour. To die for some higher ideal, for the sake of virtue, patriotism, or faith, as would become the case with the early Christians, was to make death a cause for celebration.

The Christian case against suicide was formally stated by St Augustine, who prohibited the act as a violation of the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. But Augustine was actually ambivalent on the question of suicide, permitting it in instances where individuals behaved with divine sanction in ending their lives. This exception was necessary to allow for the voluntary sacrifice of Jesus, who freely chose to die on the cross for humanity's sins. In subsequent centuries the escape clause was widened to admit the martyrs of the early Church, whose sacrifices were essential to the mythology of medieval Christianity.

The Church policy regarding suicide that emerged during the Middle Ages was loosely based on Roman law. Picking up on ancient Greek traditions, the Romans had punished self- destruction, but only under certain conditions: when an individual killed himself to escape legal prosecution or in the case of a soldier or a slave. The act of suicide was not itself considered blameworthy. Rather, the suicide's civil status, combined with his presumed motivations — the cowardliness of the accused man who sought to pre-empt the law, the disobedience of the soldier or the audacity of the slave who disposed of a life that was not truly his — determined whether the act should be punished. (The legal status of Roman women was akin to that of the slave. An unmarried female was treated as her father's dependent; the pater familias held absolute power over his daughter's life. With marriage, this power was transferred to her husband.)

The Christian position was different. What made suicide a sin was its voluntary nature. Self- destruction was prohibited because it represented an individual's choice to do wrong, a deliberate challenge to divine authority. Following the publication of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, suicide came to be seen as a crime against society as well. Aquinas revived Aristotle's view of suicide as an act of political insubordination and also condemned self-destruction on the grounds that it went against the natural instinct for self-preservation. To the traditional religious objection, which served to deny the sinner a Christian burial, Aquinas thus added a provision which could be used to support the implementation of civil penalties against people who killed themselves. During the high Middle Ages, civil legislation against self-murder was enacted in the majority of Western European states. Under no circumstances were men or women permitted to sacrifice themselves without divine sanction or to place their needs above the needs of the community to which they belonged.

The Enlightenment brought into question the moral implications of self-destruction. For the eighteenth-century philosophes, the issue proved to be an effective weapon in their crusade against absolutism and the Christian religion. Voltaire and others revitalized the classical tradition in the name of rationalism and freedom, portraying Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca — all advocates of the right to die — as early upholders of the secular cause. The Romantics turned self-destruction into a literary convention, further weakening the stigma attached to the act. Driven to despair by the death of their beloved or, worse still, loving and being loved by someone who belonged to another, countless characters in nineteenth-century fiction actively courted the solace which death alone could provide.

Suicide was decriminalized during the French Revolution, and neither Napoleon nor his monarchist successors reinstated the laws against it. And with the emergence of the psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century, the tendency to interpret the act as the inadvertent consequence of psychological problems, which could be diagnosed, treated, and cured, displaced the religious impulse to judge it in moral terms. Thus, while the Catholic Church continues to regard suicide as a sin, the modern inclination to attribute it to depression makes the deprivation of a religious funeral rare.

The greatest controversy today is over the question of assisted suicide. It is a felony to help someone commit suicide in Great Britain and in twenty-eight American states, but in neither country is it illegal to kill oneself. In effect, this means that only healthy people are allowed by the law to take their lives, since people who are seriously ill are often unable to kill themselves without assistance. Supporters of euthanasia aim to do nothing more than to decriminalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill, as has been done in the Netherlands. Opponents of the right to die range from Christian activists who invoke religious arguments against the taking of human life to physicians who think the need for assisted suicide would vanish with more effective strategies for pain management in the last months of life. On a policy level, some argue in favour of allocating limited health care resources toward people whose lives can be saved instead of prolonging the existence of someone already near death, particularly when that person no longer wishes to live. This line of argument has been criticized by those who envision the day when sick people will be hurried to their deaths for reasons of economic expediency.

Current thinking on suicide also owes much to the development of the social sciences, and to the work of Durkheim in particular. What distinguishes the sociological approach from the psychological is that it diminishes the importance of individual intentions in assessing the causes of suicide. Even the most private of human activities, the decision to end one's own life, turns out to be socially determined. Like other forms of collective behaviour, its incidence is governed by regular laws. To isolate the social factors conducive to high rates of self-destruction is the object of suicide prevention programmes today.

— Lisa Lieberman

Bibliography

• Kushner, H. I. (1989) Self-destruction in the Promised Land. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick and London.
• Lieberman, L. (2003) Leaving You: the cultural meaning of suicide. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago

See also euthanasia.

The intentional taking of one’s own life.

Suicide is defined as the act of deliberately taking one's own life. It occurs most often in response to a crisis such as a death or the loss of a relationship or job. During a crisis people experience a wide range of feelings, and each person's response to crisis is different. It is normal to feel frightened or anxious or depressed. If a person feels overwhelmed or unable to cope, he or she may try to commit suicide.

Almost all people who kill themselves either suffered from depression or had substance abuse problems. People who are lonely and isolated or who have histories of previous suicide attempts are also at greater risk for attempting suicide.

In 1996, approximately 31,000 people died of suicide in the United States. Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death overall, and the third leading cause of death among American teenagers. In Canada, suicide is second only to motor-vehicle accidents as a cause of death among adolescents.

The suicide rate is twice the murder rate among those aged 15 to 24, and it has increased dramatically in recent years. Each year, two thousand adolescents commit suicide in the United States. The highest suicide rates in the United States are found in white men over age 85. Men are more than four times as likely as women to die by suicide, yet women are more likely to make a nonlethal suicide attempt.

Suicide is a major public health problem. The need for a public health approach to suicide can be found in the African-American community, where the suicide rate among youths more than doubled between 1980 and 1995. Further, the number of suicides in the United States outnumbered homicides in 1995. Each year, firearms are used as many times for suicide as they are for murder. In some other countries, 71 percent of all firearm deaths are suicide.

Attempted and completed suicides result in enormous social, economic, and medical costs. Suicide is very disruptive to the quality of life of survivors and their families and friends. In 1995 it was estimated that in the United States each suicide attempt costs approximately $33,000. The cost of a completed suicide has been estimated at almost $400,000. These estimates were derived from factors including the expense of hospitalization, medication, and more general social costs.

Public health professionals have a major role to play in addressing the problem of suicide. Public health programs and policies can play a part before, during, and after completed or attempted suicides. First, public health programs are an important aspect of the prevention of suicide. Education campaigns can be used to increase knowledge and to change people's attitudes, beliefs, and values about suicide, and about people who may have attempted suicide. People may have distorted ideas about suicidal persons. For example, it is a myth that people who commit suicide never talk about it first. Most people provide important warning signs that can help to reduce the risk of suicide.

Health education can be combined with counseling or support programs. These programs can be provided by trained public health professionals or by peer counselors. For example, teenagers can be trained to provide counseling and support for other teens. Suicide awareness or prevention programs can be delivered in a variety of settings such as schools, churches, or in the community as a whole. They can also be delivered in psychiatric settings.

A second aspect of the prevention of suicide lies in judging or assessing a person's risk for suicide. Public health professionals such as nurses or doctors can help to prevent completed suicides by identifying people who may be thinking about or planning to try to commit suicide. They can also provide support through crisis or suicide-prevention counseling.

Public health can also play a valuable role during a suicide attempt. A suicide attempt is often a person's response to a crisis, or to a time when they feel overwhelmed or hopeless. Public health professionals can help during a suicide attempt through suicide-prevention counseling. This type of short-term counseling involves providing support and guidance to an individual who is suicidal. Its purpose is to decrease the person's emotional pain, to make sure that the person is safe, and to help develop a plan for coping. Sometimes suicide-prevention counseling includes connecting a person to community or health services. These services can then provide longer-term support.

Suicide prevention counseling is a valuable tool for public health. It is relatively low-cost, flexible, and simple to provide. A wide variety of health professionals, including doctors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers, can be taught to help people with suicide-prevention counseling techniques. These services can be provided in a wide variety of places or settings, including hospitals, community clinics, and telephone-based crisis centers or helplines. Suicide-prevention services provide an important link between the community and the formal health care system.

Public health professionals who work in suicide prevention and counseling are faced with a growing variety of issues and clients. Most communities are home to an increased number of people from a wide variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. There are also more older people in society. New issues that might trigger a suicide attempt include elder abuse, racism or discrimination, bullying, or gay bashing. Police officers, firemen, paramedics, and others are being trained to deliver on-the-spot suicide prevention counseling.

There is also a role for public health following a completed or attempted suicide. A suicide attempt or death can have a traumatic effect on the quality of life of survivors and their families and friends. Public health programs can provide important support services to survivors of a suicide attempt and their families.

Public health is only one important part of society's response to suicide as a health and social problem. There is also a role for law enforcement, the education system, the government, and the formal health care system in prevention, treatment, and follow-up to a suicide attempt.

Law enforcement (police officers) and public health professionals can cooperate to help suicidal persons. Police officers are often the first ones on the scene of a suicide attempt. They may act to prevent a suicidal person from hurting themselves (or someone else) through suicide prevention counseling. The may detain someone who is at high risk for suicide and refer him or her to appropriate public health resources.

Legislators can also help to address the challenges of suicide by creating policies or laws to support the development of public health programs and the training of public health professionals. They can also work to change society's attitude toward suicide and suicidal people. One example of this type of work is the fact that in many countries suicide is no longer illegal. Attempting suicide is seen as a mental health issue, not a crime. In 1999 the United States Public Health Service issued the first-ever Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, as well as a Call to Action on Suicide Prevention, charting out this new approach to suicide.

The educational and health care systems also have a role to play in the prevention, treatment, and follow-up to a suicide attempt. Schools provide access to most young people and provide a place for delivering suicide prevention or awareness programs. They can also teach young people to recognize the warning signs of a potential suicide attempt in their friends, to provide peer counseling, and how to get immediate help and support. This is important because young people are at higher risk of attempting suicide than most adults.

The formal health care system (hospitals, clinics, doctor's offices) can play an important role in two main ways. First, people who are suicidal may come to an emergency room or a physician's office. In these cases, the health system serves as a "first-response" and crisis service. Second, once a person has been identified by a public health or law enforcement professional as suicidal, they may need to be hospitalized for a period of time. Health professionals can provide medications and further counseling or support to a suicidal person and their family.

Once a suicidal person is released from a hospital, public health professionals may make home visits or provide follow-up support through a community-based clinic. The prevention of suicide and the provision of support to people who are suicidal play an important and increasing role in the health of individuals, families, and communities. The most comprehensive national strategies on suicide have been developed by Finland, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.

(SEE ALSO: Crisis Counseling; Gun Control; Hotlines, Helplines, Telephone Counseling; Mental Health; School Health; Social Work; Violence)

Bibliography

Carter, C., and Baume, P. (1999). "Suicide Prevention: A Public Health Approach." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Mental Health Nursing 8:45–50.

Harwitz, D., and Ravizza, L. (2000). "Suicide and Depression." Emergency Medical Clinics of North America 18:263–271.

Lester, D. "Estimating the True Economic Cost of Suicide." Perceptual and Master Skills 80:746.

Office of the Surgeon General (1999). Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General. Washington, DC: U.S. Public Health Service.

Potter, L. B.; Powell, K. P.; and Kachur, S. P. (1995). "Suicide Prevention from a Public Health Respective." Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 25:82–91.

U.S. Public Health Service (1999). The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent Suicide. Washington, DC: U.S. Public Health Service.

— C. JAMES FRANKISH; ROBBIN JEFFEREYS

For more information on suicide, visit Britannica.com.

There is some confusion about the burial of suicides, reflecting the fact that legally they were criminals if sane, but not if ‘the balance of mind was disturbed’. Up to 1823, those found guilty of the crime were given a degrading burial in the roadway, possibly at a crossroads, and/or staked; after that date, and at all periods for the insane, it was left to the clergy to decide whether churchyard burial could be allowed or not. One solution was to lay the suicide on the north side (MacDonald and Murphy, 1990).

See BURIAL, IRREGULAR, CROSSROADS, NORTH.

Intentional self-killing. Wide definitions would include martyrdom and self-sacrifice; narrower definitions would be motivated by the thought that these cases are frequently noble and heroic, whereas suicide is a common object of moral prohibition. This prohibition was shaky in the early Christian tradition, and uncommon in other cultures, where suicide in various circumstances may be institutionally embedded. The ban was fortified in the middle ages and it became a bone of contention between Enlightenment thinkers, notably Hume, and conservatives such as Kant. Suicide became fashionable in the Romantic era, but diagnosed as the result of either psychological illness (Freud) or the pressures of social conditions (Durkheim) by the 20th century. An awakening perception of the intolerable ways the medical profession manages death, especially in the United States, has led to death-with-dignity movements, assisted by sympathetic physicians and self-help groups.See also act/ommissions doctrine, euthanasia.

Suicide is seen by Buddhism as a futile act that will not provide a solution to suffering (duḥkha). By virtue of its belief in rebirth, Buddhism teaches that that suicide does not offer a permanent release from life's problems but merely postpones them to be faced at a later time. Moreover, the taking of any life (including one's own) is prohibited by the first of the Five Precepts (pañca-śīla). This means that suicide produces evil karma that will simply aggravate the difficulties rather than diminish them. Buddhism teaches that what it calls ‘a precious human rebirth’ is extremely difficult to attain, and that to cut it short is to waste an invaluable opportunity for spiritual development. It also deprives others of the benefits one might bring to them as a Bodhisattva, apart from the grief it brings to friends and relatives. There are two particular circumstances that have been thought to be exceptions to the above general rule. The first concerns suicide by Arhats, and some scholars have concluded that Buddhism regards this as morally permissible. This popular but doctrinally dubious notion has gained currency by being linked to the idea that the enlightened pass beyond conventional moral norms, a view that no longer commands wide respect. The second case is the practice of ritual suicide in Japan (hara kiri). This is a striking feature of Japanese culture that has no precedent in Indian Buddhism and is not sanctioned by mainstream Buddhist ethics. See also euthanasia; Vakkali.

Suicide is a symptomatic act connected most frequently to the framework of depression and melancholy. Its etiology is varied and complex, since it is characterized by the collapse of the ego, along with self-reproach and a diminution or a loss of self-esteem—and, at the same time, by a magic omnipotence which allows the annihilation of internal persecutors, as well as a manic feeling based on the denial of death itself. While suicide may appear to be a response to persecutory guilt, it is also a projection of this guilt onto objects as well as a liberation from their control through the death the subject has chosen for himself.

Suicide was discussed in the psychoanalytic literature as early as 1907, as recorded in the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst, 1962-75), but it was a rather superficial discussion, centered on the fact that the differing choice of means by men and women reveals a primal sexual symbolism. From this came the formula that "suicide is the climax of negative autoeroticism" (Minutes, Vol. 1, February 13, 1907, p. 114). This should be understood in the context of the opposition between the ego instincts and sexual instincts in Freud's earliest theorization: "In suicide the life instinct is overwhelmed by the libido" (Vol. 2, April 20, 1910, p. 494).

In this approach, suicide, interpreted as a substitute for psychosis, seems linked both to an inability to tolerate reality and to autoerotic regression: "Suicide is an act of defense of the normal ego against psychosis" (June 6, 1907). Drive regression is equally central to Freud's ideas on the subject of the suicide of high school students; at school "Teachers. . . .must exercise a life-maintaining influence. [The function of] school is to give the child, in this stage of his detachment from his parents, a new footing within a larger relationship" (Vol. 2, April 20, 1910, p. 495). This should extend as far as not to "deny them the right to linger even in those phases of their development that seem vexing." There might well have been some evolution in Freud's thought here, especially if it is considered that, at the very beginning he insisted on the connection between neurasthenia, masturbation, and the risk of suicide. However, Freud also stressed that "in many cases it is the fear of incest itself that drives [children] to suicide" (p. 494), because of the enormous augmentation of their need for love at puberty; Freud went so far as to suggest, this being the case, that homosexuals make the best teachers, the worst being those whom the repression of their homosexuality has turned into sadists, pushing their students to suicide.

Later psychoanalytic thought on suicide followed the main ideas of Freud on the subject. First of all, in the depressive context, suicide was considered self-punishment for the desire to kill, primally directed toward another, as Freud himself stated in Totem and Taboo: "The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to blood-guilt" (1912-13a, p. 154). Since then, the risk of self-mutilation or suicide with infantile or borderline personalities has been much emphasized (Kernberg, Otto, 1984); this risk is especially a factor during fits of rage following disappointments which are blamed on others; or else there is a risk of suicide because of failure to achieve success (guilt), or, even the failure of the cure (negative therapeutic reaction).

In fact, the idea that suicide is self-punishment for the desire to kill someone else cannot be understood completely apart from the process of melancholia, whereby the loved/hated object has been introjected within the ego and has become the target of the attack. More even than "self-punishment," suicide would be murder of the other within oneself. "Probably no one finds the mental energy required to kill himself unless, in the first place, in doing so he is at the same time killing an object with whom he has identified himself, and, in the second place, is turning against himself a death-wish which had been directed against someone else" (1920a, p. 162). Freud explained that "the ego is destroyed by the object."

The enigma constituted by suicide in relation to the self-preservative or ego instincts has also been approached in another way, through considering that it is accompanied paradoxically by a tentative intent to reappropriate vital energy, or, indeed, is even prompted by the fantasy of beginning a new life (Grinberg, León, 1983). Accordingly, suicide would result from a state of crisis dominated by the feeling that something must change. The person committing suicide "convokes death imaginally to assure himself paradoxically that life exists" (Triandafillidis, Alexandra, 1991). Ideal images of oneself and others can then survive, at the price of the death of the bad objects cluttering the ego.

The vital stakes involved in this symptomatic conduct have inclined authors not only to attempt to understand the suicidal mechanism, but also to describe its advance symptoms, evaluating the risk of suicide in order to decide on a therapeutic approach, especially in a care-giving institutional setting. León Grinberg (1983) emphasized suicidal premeditation and the fact that a suicidal plan follows the idea of suicide, which was at first only a way of dealing with anxiety. Continuing to the act of suicide depends on an "encounter," which might favor tipping the fantasy into reality. This author also examined factors of present or past vulnerability (feeling of culpability, narcissistic wound, loss of loved object, and so forth). Otto Kernberg (1984) emphasized the need for the therapist not to be fooled by an accentuation of the manic element; he stressed the seriousness of cases where "aggressiveness has infiltrated the grandiose Self," joined to an inability to enter into interpersonal relations and feel emotions. These considerations, however, concern psychotherapeutic strategies rather than the etiology of suicide.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1912-13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.

Grinberg, León. (1983). Culpabilité et dépression. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Kernberg, Otto. (1984). Les trouble graves de la personnalité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Nuberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst. (1962-1975). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. New York: International Universities Press.

Triandafillidis, Alexandra. (1991). La dépression et son inquiétante familiarité. Paris:Éditions Universitaires.

Further Reading

Laufer, M. (Ed.). (1995). The suicidal adolescent. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

When early modern authors and intellectuals considered the topic of suicide, they started out with one salient contrast in mind: Whereas the ancient Greeks and Romans had often approved of suicide, Christians did not. For many, this contrast illustrated the superiority of Christian thinking, but throughout the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century, some who admired the ancients drew a more nuanced set of conclusions. Thomas More's Utopia (1516), for example, presents voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill in a favorable light, although More condemned suicide vigorously in other works. The bishop of Guadix, Antonio de Guevara, took inspiration from the heroic suicides of classical antiquity (for example, Cato, Diogenes, Zeno, Lucretia, Seneca) and praised the nobility of barbarians who did not overvalue life in this world. Similarly, Michel de Montaigne touched on the question of suicide repeatedly and in "A Custom of the Island of Cea" considered the topic at considerable length, thoughtfully assembling moral, religious, social, and legal views. Although he admired the deaths of the noble ancients, he was reluctant to give his blanket approval to all who sought to escape shame or pain through suicide, and in the end he thought one might kill oneself only as a last resort to avoid intense pain or torture.

Shakespeare's characters commit suicide with remarkable frequency (there are fifty-two cases in his plays), and Hamlet's soliloquy ("To be or not to be") dwells on the topic, presenting arguments both for and against (although ignoring specifically Christian objections), before concluding, famously, that the future was too murky to make self-murder a safe option. In other plays Shakespeare presents suicide as the result of tragic misunderstanding (Romeo and Juliet) or as grand examples of freedom or despair (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello). In 1610 John Donne went further, arguing in Biathanatos that sometimes suicide was justified or at least excusable. He did not proceed, as others had, from the example of ancient worthies but specifically considered the Christian grounds for condemning suicide. In a nutshell, he concluded that suicide did not necessarily and always violate the laws of nature, reason, or God. Despite the daring independence of this view, Donne forbade the publication of his book, and it only appeared in print in 1647, sixteen years after his death. This fact illustrates the ongoing and deep anxiety early modern Christians felt about suicide as both a crime and as the result of despair, the ultimate sin. Usually Protestants and Catholics united to condemn "self-murder" and to depict the devil as the prime mover or inspiration for most cases of self-destruction. As a result, throughout early modern Europe, suicides were denied burial in hallowed ground and often suffered desecration of their corpses. The worldly goods of suicides were sometimes confiscated by the crown, as was the case in England and Scotland.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, this legal and moral position decayed, not so much because suicide became positively defensible but more commonly because it seemed increasingly to be the result of melancholy madness. Moralists and theologians had regularly made provision for a sort of insanity defense of suicide. They viewed both sin and crime as actions that proceeded from free and voluntary decisions; condemning actions one could not prevent or avoid did not seem to make moral sense. Indeed, Martin Luther had carried this point so far that he thought suicides were driven to their deaths by the devil, thus extinguishing human responsibility: "I have known many cases of this kind, and I have had reason to think in most of them, that the parties were killed, directly and immediately killed by the devil, in the same way that a traveler is killed by a brigand." Most theologians, however, understood the role of the devil as that of a tempter or seducer, and therefore left ample room for the harsh condemnation of suicide, as long as it seemed clear that the victim had acted deliberately, intentionally, or voluntarily.

The Secularization of Suicide

By the late seventeenth century, suicide began to seem so alien to right reason, so much the product of melancholy or delusion (what we might call acute depression), that coroners, villagers, pastors, and magistrates were prepared to grant decent (even if quiet) burials inside the churchyard. Townsmen and villagers alike might also (as in England and Scotland) unite to portray a suspicious death as the result of illness or accident in order to circumvent the crown's efforts to confiscate a victim's estate, a move that usually added to the burdens on local poor relief. Thus from about 1650 onwards, we can mark the "secularization of suicide," that is, the development of medical or other naturalizing explanations and excuses for suicide. This evolution of public sentiment was supplemented during the eighteenth century by the moral philosophizing of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721), for example, sharply criticized the condemnation of suicide. Voltaire went further and saw suicide as a question of liberty. It could not harm God or society, in his view, to exit the world when one could no longer enjoy life or contribute to the welfare of others. David Hume also defended an individual's absolute right to suicide. Despite hesitations and equivocations, however, many philosophes were drawn to the medical conclusion that suicide was usually the result of madness or bodily disturbances.

The Social History of Suicide

Broadly speaking, this array of opinions on suicide has been well known and well described for several generations. In recent years, scholars have renewed their attention to suicide and have made several noteworthy contributions, not so much to high religious or intellectual history, but to the sociology or social distribution and cultural understandings of suicide. In this work they have often taken inspiration from the foundational work of Émile Durkheim, Le suicide (1897), which tried to demonstrate that social dynamics account for almost all the statistical variations in suicide found in modern countries. Roughly stated, Durkheim held that higher rates of suicide were prompted by increasing conditions of social isolation, so that tight webs of social support served to protect populations from the effects of urbanization, individualism, migration, and other conditions of modernity. It seemed to make sense, from this point of view, that Protestants (as part of a "modern," "secularizing," and "individualizing" movement) should always and everywhere have higher rates of suicide than presumably more traditional and more socially cohesive Catholics. This schema has inspired a great deal of modern sociological investigation, and recently scholars have extended these efforts to the early modern period. However, one supreme difficulty has been that neither the numbers of suicides nor early modern populations were reliably recorded, making the calculation of a suicide rate (the number of suicides per 100,000 population) doubly problematic.

Suicide in Britain and Germany. After an extraordinary and energetic attempt to count the number of suicides in early modern England, for example, Terence Murphy and Michael Mac Donald abandon the task of calculating the varying suicide rate from place to place and from time to time, turning instead to an examination of the varying meanings of suicide. In an excellent study of suicide in far northern Germany, Vera Lind draws similar conclusions, heaping criticism on those who have imagined that medieval or early modern rates of self-murder could be calculated unproblematically. In a vast and complex survey, Alexander Murray draws the same conclusion with respect to medieval Europe, but then curiously hazards the guess that whatever the medieval rate may have been, suicide became far more common in the sixteenth century.

Suicide in Switzerland. The most impressive recent attempt to scrutinize all the suicides in a fairly controlled population is Jeffrey Watt's study of early modern Geneva, where suicide remained rare until the end of the seventeenth century and then increased slowly in the early eighteenth century. After 1750, however, the rate jumped up by a factor of five or more, and it went even higher after 1780. Watt has been careful to count not only those cases regarded as suicide by the Genevan authorities, but to look for "disguised" suicides as well, deaths from falls or from drowning that may well have been self-inflicted even if contemporaries declined to label them self-murder. Watt's evidence is so rich and so complete that, at least for this city, a genuine suicide rate can probably be calculated. Recognizing a dramatic escalation after 1750 seems unavoidable. Rejecting an easy equation of Calvinism with higher rates of suicide, however, Watt points out that Geneva during the Reformation had promoted just as tight an integration of society as in any Catholic city or principality. Yet by the late eighteenth century, Genevans from top to bottom had grown more secular in their attitudes, abandoning belief in the devil and often in hell as well. These processes may have developed more quickly or more profoundly for men than for women, which might explain why the disproportion of male suicides became even more pronounced after 1750. On this reading, growing secularization accomplished more than just the decriminalization or medicalization of suicide; increasingly a more secular society relaxed its supportive web as well as its sanctions against self-killing. Taking one's own life became far easier to contemplate.

This finding runs counter to the conclusion of a study of suicide in Zurich, in which Markus Schär connects the rapidly escalating numbers of self-inflicted deaths in the eighteenth century not with increasingly secular attitudes but with the growth of acute religious despair among people who doubted that they could ever gain God's mercy. Oddly enough, however, both Watt and Schär agree in emphasizing the importance of religious and cultural changes, rather than social changes (such as demography, economy, and urbanization), as crucial stimulants to suicide.

The Eighteenth Century

As far as eighteenth-century Europeans were concerned, England was the classic land of melancholy and suicide. In the absence of reliable comparative studies, it is not clear that this stereotype was fully deserved. It does seem certain, however, that suicide notes and newspaper publicity about recent suicides first proliferated in England, for reasons well explored by Murphy and Mac Donald. In Germany, the popularity of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) led to a wave of widely publicized suicides supposedly inspired by the romantic death of that lovelorn protagonist. By the late eighteenth century suicide had been common enough that it seemed symptomatic of the cultural and social disruptions endured by nations undergoing rapid urbanization, industrialization, or secularization.

Bibliography

Bernardini, Paolo. Literature on Suicide, 1516–1815: A Bibliographical Essay. Lewiston, N.Y., 1996.

Donne, John. Biathanatos. Edited by Ernest W. Sullivan II. Newark, Del., and London, 1984.

Jansson, Arne. From Swords to Sorrow: Homicide and Suicide in Early Modern Stockholm. Stockholm, 1998.

Lind, Vera. Selbstmord in der frühen Neuzeit: Diskurs, Lebenswelt und kultureller Wandel am Beispiel der Herzogtümer Schleswig und Holstein. Göttingen, 1999.

Minois, Georges. The History of Suicide. Translated by L. Cochrane. Baltimore, 1999.

Murphy, Terence R., and Michael Mac Donald. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. Oxford, 1990.

Murray, Alexander. Suicide in the Middle Ages. 2 vols. Oxford, 1998, 2000.

Schär, Markus. Seelennöte der Untertanen: Selbstmord, Melancholie und Religion im Alten Zürich, 1500–1800. Zurich, 1985.

Watt, Jeffrey R. Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva. Kirksville, Mo., 2001.

—H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT

The deliberate taking of one's own life.

Under common law, suicide, or the intentional taking of one's own life, was a felony that was punished by forfeiture of all the goods and chattels of the offender. Under modern U.S. law, suicide is no longer a crime. Some states, however, classify attempted suicide as a criminal act, but prosecutions are rare, especially when the offender is terminally ill. Instead, some jurisdictions require a person who attempts suicide to undergo temporary hospitalization and psychological observation. A person who causes the death of an innocent bystander or would-be rescuer while in the process of attempting suicide may be guilty of murder or manslaughter.

More problematic is the situation in which someone helps another to commit suicide. Aiding or abetting a suicide or an attempted suicide is a crime in all states, but prosecutions are rare. Since the 1980s the question of whether physician-assisted suicide should be permitted for persons with terminal illnesses has been the subject of much debate, but as yet this issue has not been resolved.

The debate over physician-assisted suicide concerns persons with debilitating and painful terminal illnesses. Under current laws a doctor who assists a person's suicide could be charged with aiding and abetting suicide. Opponents of decriminalizing assisted suicide argue that decriminalization would lead to a "slippery slope" that would eventually result in doctors being allowed to assist persons who are not terminally ill to commit suicide.

The debate on physician-assisted suicide has intensified since 1990 when Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired Michigan pathologist, began to attend many suicides. Kevorkian has admitted to obtaining carbon monoxide and instructing persons who suffered from terminal or degenerative diseases on how to administer the gas so they would die. Despite the efforts of Michigan legislators and prosecutors to convict Kevorkian of murder, the pathologist, who was dubbed "Doctor Death," successfully fought the charges. Three murder charges were dismissed by Michigan courts and in 1994 Kevorkian was acquitted of violating Michigan's assisted suicide law (Mich. Comp. Laws § 752.1021 et seq.). Despite Kevorkian's acquittals other assisted suicide advocates believe his methods have actually hurt the cause. In 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court held that neither the Due Process Clause (Washington v. Glucksberg, ___ U.S. ___, 117 S. Ct. 2258, 138 L. Ed. 2d 772) nor the Equal Protection Clause (Vacco v. Quill, ___ U.S. ___, 117 S. Ct. 2293, 138 L. Ed. 2d 834) of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a right to assisted suicide.

Since the 1970s, most large U.S. communities have established suicide prevention measures, including telephone hot lines where a person contemplating suicide can talk to a counselor.

See: Death and Dying; Patients' Rights; Physicians and Surgeons.

Quotes:

"No one is promiscuous in his way of dying. A man who has decided to hang himself will never jump in front of a train." - A. Alvarez

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will." - Antonin Artaud

"If you must commit suicide... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of." - George Borrow

"One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot." - Francis H. Bradley

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest -- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories -- comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer." - Albert Camus

"It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." - E. M. Cioran

See more famous quotes about Suicide