suicide

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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.

Generally, as human life is considered of paramount value, one may not forfeit one's life to avoid breaking the laws of the Torah. In this spirit the sages comment on the verse in Leviticus 18:5, "You shall live by them [the commandments] and not die by them." Only in three cases is the rule that one must be prepared to die rather than violate the law: when forced into idolatry, murder, or sexual immorality.

Although there have been cases of mass suicide, such as following the fall of Masada to the Romans in 73 CE, the Halakhah does not approve of such a course of action, regardless of the circumstances.

According to halakhah, a suicide is to be buried in a separate part of the cemetery and is not to be mourned by his next of kin. Generally, rabbis seek to mitigate the severity of these provisions by ruling that the deceased took his own life while in an unbalanced state of mind and is therefore technically not a suicide.

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

A dream about suicide may suggest that conditions in the dreamer's life are so frustrating that the dreamer is no longer willing or able to cope with a business or personal relationship in the same way as in the past.

Suicide was one of the acts universally associated with vampirism. In cultures as varied as in Russia , Romania , West Africa, and China , suicide was considered an individual's pathway into vampirism. In the West in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures, suicide has traditionally been considered a sin. In most other cultures suicide was frowned upon in an equivalent manner. Japan has generally been considered unique in its designation of a form of suicide called hari-kari, as a means of reversing the dishonor that initially led to the suicide.

Suicide was among the anti-social actions a person could commit that caused vampirism. In Eastern Europe, those actions included being a quarrelsome person, a drunkard, or associated with heresy or sorcery/witchcraft. In each society, there were activities considered a threat to the community's well-being that branded a person as different. While these varied considerably from culture to culture, suicide was most ubiquitous in its condemnation.

Suicide signaled the existence of extreme unresolved tension in the social fabric of a community. It was viewed as evidence of the family's and the community's inability to socialize an individual, as well as a statement by the individual of complete disregard for the community's existence and its prescribed rituals. The community, in turn, showed its disapproval in its treatment of the suicide's corpse. In the West, it was often denied Christian burial and its soul considered outside of the realm of salvation (the subject had committed mortal sin without benefit of confession and forgiveness prior to death). Those who committed suicide were buried at a crossroads or at a distance from the village. The corpse might even be thrown in a river to be carried away by the current.

Those who committed suicide died leaving unfinished business with relatives and close acquaintances. They left people with unresolved grief, which became a factor, sometimes unspoken, in the survivors' personalities for the rest of their lives. Their corpses often returned to the living in dreams and as apparitions. They were the subjects of nightmares, and families and friends occasionally felt under attack from the presence of them. The deceased became a vampire, and actions had to be taken to break the connection that allowed the dead to disturb the living. The various actions taken against a corpse could be viewed as a means of emotional release for the survivors. The break in the connection was first attempted with harmless actions of protection, but, if ineffective, those efforts moved to a more serious level with mutilation (with a stake) or complete destruction (by fire) of the corpse.

Novelists and screenwriters have utilized suicide in their consideration of the problems faced by vampires who have found themselves bored with their long life, displaced in time, or have concluded that their vampire state is immoral. Immediately after becoming a vampire, for example, Lestat (The continuing character in Anne Rice's vampire novels) had to witness the suicide (by fire) of the vampire who had made him. Eventually, Armand, the leader of the Parisian community eventually committed suicide by basking into the sunlight. Placing oneself in the open as the dawn approaches is the suicide method of choice for vampires, as recently exemplified by Boya (in the 1996 movie Blood and Donuts) and Countess Maria Viroslav in Kathryn Reines' The Kiss (1996). Toward the end of Memnoch the Devil, the fifth of the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice, Armand walks into the sunlight out of his intense religious feelings after seeing Veronica's veil that Lestat had returned with for his adventure in heaven and hell.

Both the Cevaillier Futaine (the vampire in Henry Kuttner's 1037 pulp short story, "I, the Vampire" and Batman in the alternative universe Batman story Batman: Bloodstorm, committed suicide by leaving their sleeping place open for someone they knew would come in to kill them, Possibly the most ingeneous suicide device was devised for Yaksha, the original vampire in Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series. Yaksha had made a deal to redeem himself by killing all of the vampires and then himself. The saved his former lover for last. She rigged a set of explosives in a room that would kill both of them but then cleverly concealed a shield that would protect her at the crucial moment. Yaksha was killed but she survived.

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. 236 pp.
Moench, Doug, et al. Batman: Bloodstorm. New York: DC Comics, 1994. Perkowski, Jan L. The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1989. 174 pp.
Pike, Christopher. The Last vampire. New York: Archway/Pocket Book, 1994. 198 pp.
Reines, Kathryn. The Kiss. New York: Avon Books, 1996. 293 pp.
Senn, Harry A. Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 148 pp.

"Deathwish" redirects here. For other uses, see Death Wish (disambiguation).

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

For other uses, see Suicide (disambiguation).

Suicide

History

List of suicides · Suicide methods · Suicide rate

Views

Cultural · Legal · Medical · Biological · Philosophical · Religious · Right to die

Suicide crisis

Assessment of risk · Crisis hotline · Intervention · Prevention · Suicide watch

Suicide types

Copycat · Cult · Euthanasia · Familicide · Forced · Honor · Internet · Martyrdom · Mass · Murder-suicide · Ritual · Attack · By cop · Pact · Teenage

Related phenomena

Ideation · Self-harm · Suicide note

v • d • e

A painting of the English romantic poet Thomas Chatterton, believed to have killed himself with arsenic in 1770

Look up suicide in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Suicide (Latin suicidium, from sui caedere, to kill oneself) is the intentional taking of one's own life. Many dictionaries also note the metaphorical sense of "willful destruction of one's self-interest"^[1] (e.g., "political suicide"). Suicide may occur for a number of reasons, including depression, shame, guilt, desperation, physical pain, emotional pressure, anxiety, financial difficulties, or other undesirable situations. The World Health Organization noted that over one million people commit suicide every year, and that it is one of the leading causes of death among teenagers and adults under 35.^[2] There are an estimated 10 to 20 million non-fatal attempted suicides every year worldwide.^[3]

Views on suicide have been influenced by cultural views on existential themes such as religion, honor, and the meaning of life. The Abrahamic religions consider suicide an offense towards God due to religious belief in the sanctity of life. In the West it was often regarded as a serious crime. Japanese views on honor and religion led to seppuku, one of the most painful methods of suicide, to be respected as a means to atone for mistakes or failure, or as a form of protest during the samurai era. In the 20th century, suicide in the form of self-immolation has been used as a form of protest, and in the form of kamikaze and suicide bombing as a military or terrorist tactic. Sati is a Hindu funeral practice in which the widow would immolate herself on her husband's funeral pyre, either willingly, or under pressure from the family and in-laws.^[4]

Medically assisted suicide (euthanasia, or the right to die) is currently a controversial ethical issue involving people who are terminally ill, in extreme pain, and/or have minimal quality of life through injury or illness. Self-sacrifice for others is not usually considered suicide, as the goal is not to kill oneself but to save another.

The predominant view of modern medicine is that suicide is a mental health concern, associated with psychological factors such as the difficulty of coping with depression, inescapable suffering or fear, or other mental disorders and pressures. A suicide attempt is sometimes interpreted as a "cry for help" and attention, or to express despair and the wish to escape, rather than a genuine intent to die.^[5] Most people who attempt suicide do not complete suicide on a first attempt; those who later gain a history of repetitions have a significantly higher probability of eventual completion of suicide.^[6]

Contents 1 Epidemiology 2 Related phenomena 2.1 Euthanasia and assisted suicide 2.2 Murder-suicide 2.3 Suicide attack 2.4 Self-injury 2.5 Suicide locations 3 Suicide methods 4 Suicide and mental illness 4.1 Controversial criticism 4.2 Other reasons 4.2.1 Suicide as a form of defiance and protest 4.2.2 Judicial suicide 4.2.3 Military suicide 4.2.4 Dutiful suicide 4.2.4.1 Examples 5 Impact of suicide 6 Views on suicide 6.1 Medical 6.2 Criminal 6.3 Cultural 6.4 Religious 6.5 Philosophical 7 Peer encouragement of suicide 8 See also 8.1 Books 8.2 Lists 9 Footnotes 10 Further reading 11 External links

Epidemiology

Main article: Epidemiology of suicide

According to official statistics, about a million people die by suicide annually, more than those murdered or killed in war.^[7] According to 2005 data, suicides in the U.S. outnumber homicides by nearly 2 to 1 and ranks as the 11th leading cause of death in the country, ahead of liver disease and Parkinson's disease.^[8] According to a 2008 report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's, Center for Injury Research and Policy, the rate of suicide in the United States is increasing for the first time in a decade. The increase in the overall suicide rate between 1999 and 2005 was due primarily to an increase in suicides among whites aged 40–64, with white middle-aged women experiencing the largest annual increase.^[9] Worldwide suicide rates have increased by 60% in the past 50 years, mainly in the developing countries. Most suicides in the world occur in Asia, which is estimated to account for up to 60% of all suicides. According to the World Health Organization, China, India and Japan may account for 40% of all world suicides.^[10]

Gender and suicide: In the Western world, males die much more often by means of suicide than do females, although females attempt suicide more often. This pattern has held for at least a century.^{[citation needed]} Some medical professionals believe this stems from the fact that males are more likely to end their lives through effective violent means (guns, knives, hanging, etc.), while women primarily use more failure-prone methods such as overdosing on medications.

United States suicide rates for white men, by Health Service Area, 1988–1992. This map and the map at right use the same color scale: note the large difference in rates between men and women. The regional patterns for men and women are similar, but not the same.^[11]

United States suicide rates for white women, by Health Service Area, 1988–1992.^[11]

Others ascribe the disparity to inherent differences in male/female psychology. Greater social stigma against male depression and a lack of social networks of support and help with depression are often identified as key reasons for men's disproportionately higher level of suicides, since suicide as a "cry for help" is not seen by men as an equally viable option. Typically males die from suicide three to four times more often as females, and not unusually five or more times as often. CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably is a charity in the UK that attempts to highlight this issue for public discussion.

Excess male mortality from suicide is also evident from data from non-western countries. In 1979–81, 74 territories reported one or more cases of suicides. Two of these reported equal rates for both sexes: Seychelles and Kenya. Three territories reported female rates exceeding male rates: Papua New Guinea, Macau, French Guiana. The remaining 69 territories had male suicide rates greater than female suicide rates.^[12]

Barraclough found that the female rates of those aged 5–14 equaled or exceeded the male rates only in 14 countries, mainly in South America and Asia.^[13] China is the only country in the world where more women than men take their own lives, with female suicides representing 58 percent of the total.^[14]

Suicides per 100,000 people per year^[15]

Rank	Country	Males	Females	Total	Year
1	Lithuania	68.1	12.9	38.6	2005
2	Belarus	63.3	10.3	35.1	2003
3	Russia	58.1	9.8	32.2	2005
4	Slovenia	42.1	11.1	26.3	2006
5	Hungary	42.3	11.2	26.0	2005
6	Kazakhstan	45.0	8.1	25.9	2005
7	Latvia	42.0	9.6	24.5	2005

National suicide rates: Some studies show that national suicide rates are generally stable,^[16] but differ significantly between countries.^[17]

Suicides in the U.S. by gender, age, and racial or ethnic group, 1999–2005.

Ethnic groups and suicide: In the USA, Caucasians die by suicide more often than African Americans do. This is true for both genders. Non-Hispanic Caucasians are nearly 2.5 times more likely to kill themselves than are African Americans or Hispanics.^[18]

Age and suicide: In the USA, males over the age of seventy die by suicide more often than younger males. There is no such trend for females. Older non-Hispanic Caucasian men are much more likely to kill themselves than older men or women of any other group.

Season and suicide: People die by suicide more often during spring and summer. The idea that suicide is more common during Christmas is a common misconception.^[19] There is also potential risk of suicide in some people experiencing Seasonal Affective Disorder. Some studies have found that elderly people are more likely to commit suicide around their birthdays.^[who?]

Related phenomena

Euthanasia and assisted suicide

Euthanasia machine invented by Dr. Philip Nitschke, on display at Science Museum, London.

Main article: Euthanasia

Individuals who wish to end their own life may enlist the assistance of another person to achieve death. The other person, usually a family member or physician, may help carry out the act if the individual lacks the physical capacity to do so even with the supplied means. Assisted suicide is a contentious moral and political issue in many countries, as seen in the scandal surrounding Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a medical practitioner who supported euthanasia, was found to have helped patients end their own lives, and was sentenced to prison time.

Murder-suicide

It has been suggested that Murder-suicide be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

A murder-suicide is an act in which an individual kills one or more other persons immediately before or at the same time as him or herself.

The combination of murder and suicide can take various forms, including:

• Suicide to facilitate murder, as in suicide bombing
• Suicide after murder to escape punishment
• Suicide after murder as a form of self-punishment due to guilt
• Having a combined objective of suicide and murder
• Considering one's suicide as the main act, but murdering one's children first, to avoid them becoming orphans, to be together in an expected afterlife, in the context of severe depression where the person feels he is sparing his loved ones from a horrible life, or simply just to experience the act
• Joint suicide in the form of killing the other with consent, and then killing oneself
• Punishment - taking revenge on those deemed responsible and escaping the world seen as a terrible place, as in many school shootings
• Committing suicide using a method that results in the deaths of others such as crashing an aeroplane, such a suicide was famously attempted in FedEx Flight 705
• Some cases of cult suicide may also involve murder. Conversely, many spree killings have ended in suicide.

The motivation for the murder in murder-suicide can be purely criminal in nature or be perceived by the perpetrator as an act of care for loved ones in the context of severe depression. The severely depressed person may see the world as a terrible place and can feel that they are helping those they care about by removing them from it.

Suicide attack

Main article: Suicide attack

A suicide attack is when an attacker perpetrates an act of violence against others, typically to achieve a military or political goal, that results in his or her own death as well. Suicide bombings are often regarded as an act of terrorism. Historical examples include the assassination of Czar Alexander II and the in part successful kamikaze attacks by Japanese air pilots during the Second World War.

Self-injury

Main article: Self-injury

Self-injury is not a suicide attempt; however, initially self-injury was erroneously classified as a suicide attempt. There is a non-causal correlation between self-harm and suicide; both are most commonly a joint effect of depression.

Suicide locations

Some landmarks have become known for high-levels of suicide attempts. Two of the most popular locations in the world are reportedly San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and Japan's Aokigahara Forest.^[20] In 2005, the Golden Gate Bridge had a count exceeding 1,200 jumpers since its construction in 1937,^[21] while Aokigahara has had a record of 78 bodies found within the forest in 2002, replacing the previous record of 73 in 1998.^[22] The suicide rate of both places is so high that numerous signs, urging potential victims of suicide to seek help, have been posted. Beachy Head, in the United Kingdom, is another popular suicide location.^[23]

Suicide methods

Percent of suicides that are by firearm in the United States, by gender and age, 1999–2005. Data from the CDC.

Main article: Suicide methods

According to Professor Keith Hawton, of the Centre for Suicide Research, at Oxford University, "“All research suggests that showing, in detail, methods of suicide does result in an increase of those methods immediately afterwards, so portrayal of methods of suicide is ill-advised.” (Article in The Times 21 October 2006, 'Audiences are haunted by a film that shows the suicide leaps of real people'). According to Mr Mike Cobb, of The Samaritans, an organisation which works with people contemplating suicide, "Even showing a method on Casualty has led to an increase" (same article in The Times 21 October 2006, 'Audiences are haunted by a film that shows the suicide leaps of real people'). According to the Irish Association of Suicidology [3], "Copy cat suicides account for about six per cent of all suicides".

In countries where firearms are readily available, many suicides involve the use of firearms. Over 52% of suicides that occurred in the United States in 2005 were by firearm.^[24] Asphyxiation methods (including hanging) and toxification (poisoning and overdose) are fairly common as well. Together they comprised about 40% of U.S. suicides during the same time period. Other methods of suicide include blunt force trauma (jumping from a building or bridge, self-defenestrating, stepping in front of a train, or car collision, for example). Exsanguination or bloodletting (slitting one's wrist or throat), intentional drowning, self-immolation, electrocution, and intentional starvation are other suicide methods. Individuals may also intentionally provoke another person into administering lethal action against them, as in suicide by cop.

Suicide and mental illness

Studies show a high incidence of mental disorders in suicide victims at the time of their death with the total figure ranging from 98%^[25] to 87.3%^[26] with mood disorders and substance abuse being the two most common. A person diagnosed with schizophrenia may commit suicide for a number of reasons, including because of depression. Suicide among people suffering from bipolar disorder is often an impulse, which is due to the sufferer's extreme mood swings (one of the main symptoms of bipolar disorder), or also possibly an outcome of delusions occurring during an episode of mania or psychotic depression. Major depressive disorder is associated with a higher than average rate of suicide, especially in men.

World map of suicide rates per 100,000.

Controversial criticism

Many studies measuring incidence of psychiatric disorder in suicides employ after-the-fact diagnosis. Such studies are often criticized for lack of objectivity. The main argument is that a decision of the psychiatrist is biased if he believes that suicidal people must be mentally ill. This bias is indirectly confirmed by statistics: "the highest estimate of mental illness when a sample had been diagnosed before suicide was 22 percent. Afterward the highest estimate was 90 percent."^[27]

Use of after-the-fact diagnosis may lead to a kind of tautology. In simple words, "We say, in essence, 'All people who attempt suicide are mentally ill.' If someone asks, 'How do you know they are mentally ill?' the implied answer is, 'Because only mentally ill persons would try to commit suicide.'^[28]

Other reasons

Suicide as a form of defiance and protest

In the 1960s, Buddhist monks, most notably Thích Quảng Đức in South Vietnam, drew Western attention to their protests against President Ngô Đình Diệm by burning themselves to death. Also in the 1960s, Quaker Norman Morrison committed suicide by self-immolation to protest the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. In Ireland there exists a long tradition of hunger strike to the death against British rule, predominantly in Northern Ireland during the infamous 1981 hunger strikes, led by Bobby Sands, which resulted in 10 deaths. The period caused international outrage as shown by the Indian parliament standing for two minutes of silence and the Iranian government renaming the street in Tehran on which the British Embassy stands to "Bobby Sands Street".

Judicial suicide

A person who has committed a crime may commit suicide to avoid prosecution and disgrace:

• Hermann Göring, high-ranked Nazi and head of the Luftwaffe, committed suicide with cyanide capsules rather than be hanged after his conviction at the Nuremberg Trials.
• Irish revolutionary Theobald Wolfe Tone cut his throat rather than be hanged, after his request for a firing squad (a death worthy of a soldier) was denied.
• Colonel Alfred Redl was presented with the evidence of his espionage and shot himself to avoid a trial.
• Budd Dwyer, a Treasurer of Pennsylvania, killed himself on January 22, 1987 while on live television after being convicted (wrongly, he claimed) of financial crimes, in order to draw attention to his case and to enable his widow to draw survivor benefits (since he died before being removed from office).
• More recently, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, dubbed the DC Madam by the media, was convicted on April 15, 2008 of racketeering, using the mail for illegal purposes, and money laundering. On May 1, 2008 she was found dead by hanging, an apparent suicide.

Military suicide

Main articles: Suicide attack and :Category:Military personnel who committed suicide

A kamikaze attack on the escort carrier USS White Plains

In the final days of World War II, some Japanese pilots volunteered for kamikaze missions in an attempt to forestall defeat for the Empire. Near the end of WW2 the Japanese designed a small aircraft whose only purpose was kamikaze missions. In Nazi Germany, many soldiers and government officials^[who?] (including Adolf Hitler) killed themselves rather than surrender to Allied forces. The Japanese also built one-man "human torpedo" suicide submarines called Kaitens.

Dutiful suicide

Dutiful suicide is an act, or non-fatal attempt at the act, of fatal self-violence at one's own hands done in the belief that it will secure a greater good, rather than to escape harsh or impossible conditions. It can be voluntary, to relieve some dishonor or punishment, or imposed by threats of death or reprisals on one's family or reputation (a kind of murder by remote control). It can be culturally traditional or generally abhorred; it can be heavily ritualized as in seppuku or purely functional. Dutiful suicide can be distinguished from a kamikaze or suicide bomb attack, in which a fighter consumes his own life in delivering a weapon to the enemy. An example of dutiful suicide is a soldier in a foxhole throwing his body on a live grenade to save the lives of his comrades.

Examples

• Disgraced Roman aristocrats were sometimes allowed to commit suicide to spare themselves a trial and penalties against their families. An example of this was Emperor Nero who reportedly committed forced suicide following a large fire that burned through much of Rome.^[29]
• Erwin Rommel, found to have foreknowledge of the July 20 Plot on Hitler's life, was threatened with public trial, execution and reprisals on his family unless he killed himself, which he did.^[30]

Impact of suicide

It is estimated that each suicide in the United States leaves an average of six people intimately affected by the death, either as a spouse, parent, significant other, sibling, or child of the deceased person. These people are referred to as survivors.^[31]

It is estimated that 80% of all in home suicide scenes are cleaned up by a close friend, significant other, or a family member. Those that clean up a suicide scene of a close friend, significant other, or a family member are 75% more likely to commit suicide later on in life.^[32]

Views on suicide

Medical

Main article: Suicide intervention

In the United States, individuals who express the intent to harm themselves are automatically determined to lack the present mental capacity to refuse treatment, and can be transported to the emergency department against their will. An emergency physician will determine whether inpatient care at a mental health care facility is warranted. This is sometimes referred to as being "committed". A court hearing may be held to determine the individual's competence. In most states, a psychiatrist may hold the person for a specific time period without a judicial order. If the psychiatrist determines the person to be a threat to himself or others, the person may be admitted involuntarily to a psychiatric treatment facility. This period is usually of three days duration. After this time the person must be discharged or appear in front of a judge. As in any judicial proceeding this person has a right to legal counsel.^[33]

Switzerland has recently taken steps to legalize assisted suicide for the chronically mentally ill. The high court in Lausanne, in a 2006 ruling, granted an anonymous individual with longstanding psychiatric difficulties the right to end his own life. At least one leading American bioethicist, Jacob Appel of Brown University, has argued that the American medical community ought to condone suicide in certain individuals with mental illness.^[34]

Criminal

Main article: Legal views of suicide

In some jurisdictions, an act or incomplete act of suicide is considered to be a crime. More commonly, a surviving party member who assisted in the suicide attempt will face criminal charges.

In Brazil, if the help is directed to a minor, the penalty is applied in its double and not considered as homicide. In Italy and Canada, instigating another to suicide is also a criminal offense. In Singapore, assisting in the suicide of a mentally handicapped person is a capital offense. In India, abetting suicide of a minor or a mentally challenged person can result in a maximum 1 year prison term with a possible fine.^[35]

A tantō knife prepared for seppuku

In Germany, the following laws apply to cases of suicide:^[36]

• Active euthanasia (killing on request) is prohibited by article 216 of the StGB (Strafgesetzbuch, German Criminal Code), punishable with six months to five years in jail
• German law interprets suicide as an accident and anyone present during suicide may be prosecuted for failure to render aid in an emergency. A suicide legally becomes emergency when a suicidal person loses consciousness. Failure to render aid is punishable under article 323c of the StGB, with a maximum one year jail sentence.

Cultural

Main article: Cultural views of suicide

In the Warring States Period and the Edo period of Japan, samurai who disgraced their honor chose to end their own lives by seppuku, a method in which the samurai takes a sword and slices into his abdomen, causing a fatal injury. The cut is usually performed diagonally from the top corner of the samurai's writing hand, and has long been considered an honorable form of death (even when done to punish dishonor). Though such a wound would be fatal, seppuku was not always technically suicide, as the samurai's assistant (the kaishaku) would usually stand by to cut short any suffering by quickly administering a fatal cut to the back of the neck (just short of decapitation), sometimes as soon as the first tiny incision into the abdomen was made.

Religious

Main article: Religious views of suicide

In most forms of Christianity, suicide is considered a sin, based mainly on the writings of influential Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas; suicide was not considered a sin under the Byzantine Christian code of Justinian, for instance.^[37][38] The argument is based on the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" (made applicable under the New Covenant by Jesus in Matthew 19:18), as well as the idea that life is a gift given by God which should not be spurned, and that suicide is against the "natural order" and thus interferes with God's master plan for the world.^[39][40] However, it is believed that mental illness or grave fear of suffering diminishes the responsibility of the one completing suicide.^[41] Counter-arguments include the following: that the sixth commandment is more accurately translated as "thou shalt not murder", not necessarily applying to the self; that taking one's own life no more violates God's law than does curing a disease; and that a number of suicides by followers of God are recorded in the Bible with no dire condemnation.^[42]

Judaism focuses on the importance of valuing this life, and as such, suicide is tantamount to denying God's goodness in the world. Despite this, under extreme circumstances when there has seemed no choice but to either be killed or forced to betray their religion, Jews have committed individual suicide or mass suicide (see Masada, First French persecution of the Jews, and York Castle for examples) and as a grim reminder there is even a prayer in the Jewish liturgy for "when the knife is at the throat", for those dying "to sanctify God's Name". (See: Martyrdom). These acts have received mixed responses by Jewish authorities, regarded both as examples of heroic martyrdom, whilst others state that it was wrong for them to take their own lives in anticipation of martyrdom.^[43]

Suicide is not allowed in the religion of Islam; however, martyring oneself for Allah (during combat) is not the same as completing suicide. Suicide in Islam is seen as a sign of disbelief in God.^[44] The use of suicide attacks is strictly forbidden in Islam,^{[citation needed]} however it is practised by Radical groups such as Hamas and Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In Hinduism, suicide is frowned upon and is considered equally sinful as murdering another. Hindu Scriptures state that one who commits suicide will become part of the spirit world, wandering earth until the time one would have otherwise died, had one not committed suicide.^[45]

Philosophical

Main article: Philosophical views of suicide

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The Way Out, or Suicidal Ideation: George Grie, 2007

Some see suicide as a legitimate matter of personal choice and a human right (colloquially known as the right to die movement), and maintain that no one should be forced to suffer against their will, particularly from conditions such as incurable disease, mental illness, and old age that have no possibility of improvement. Proponents of this view reject the belief that suicide is always irrational, arguing instead that it can be a valid last resort for those enduring major pain or trauma. This perspective is most popular in continental Europe, where euthanasia and other such topics are commonly discussed in parliament, although it has a good deal of support.^[46]

A narrower segment of this group considers suicide something between a grave but condonable choice in some circumstances and a sacrosanct right for anyone (even a young and healthy person) who believes they have rationally and conscientiously come to the decision to end their own lives. Notable supporters of this school of thought include German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer,^[47] and Scottish empiricist David Hume.^[48] Adherents of this view often advocate the abrogation of statutes that restrict the liberties of people known to be suicidal, such as laws permitting their involuntary commitment to mental hospitals.

Peer encouragement of suicide

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Some suicides are done under peer pressure. It can take place with as few as two people, in a "suicide pact", in which two people pledge to die together, or with larger amounts of people, as in a cult, as the mass suicide/massacre that took place in Jonestown, Guyana. Others have been encouraged to commit suicide. In 2008, a Florida teen committed suicide in front of a live webcam stream. Some onlookers encouraged him to do so, although they were not all proven to have been aware that it was not simply a false teen prank. Most thought he was merely play acting.^[49]

See also

• American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
• CALM, Campaign Against Living Miserably
• Cult suicide
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
• Mass suicide
• Mercy killing
• The Myth of Sisyphus
• Jack Kevorkian
• Quantum suicide
• Samaritans (charity)
• Senicide
• Suicide Act 1961
• Suicide attack
• Suicide bridge
• Suicide methods
• Suicide note
• Suicide Prevention Action Network USA
• Suicide watch

Books

• The Complete Manual of Suicide
• The Peaceful Pill Handbook
• Final Exit
• Suicide (book)

Lists

• List of countries by suicide rate
• List of suicide sites
• List of suicides

Footnotes

1. ^ "Merriam-Webster OnLine". http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suicide. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. 
2. ^ CIS: UN Body Takes On Rising Suicide Rates
3. ^ Bertolote JM, Fleischmann A (October 2002). "Suicide and psychiatric diagnosis: a worldwide perspective". World Psychiatry 1 (3): 181–5. PMID 16946849. 
4. ^ Indian woman commits sati suicide
5. ^ "WHO Europe - Suicide Prevention" (PDF). World Health Organization. 2005-01-15. http://www.euro.who.int/document/MNH/ebrief07.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-09-16. 
6. ^ Shaffer D (September 1988). "The epidemiology of teen suicide: an examination of risk factors". J Clin Psychiatry 49 (Suppl): 36–41. PMID 3047106. 
7. ^ "Suicide prevention". WHO Sites: Mental Health. World Health Organization. February 16, 2006. http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/. Retrieved on 2008-09-16. 
8. ^ "2005 Data" (PDF). Suicide Prevention. Suicidology.org. 2005. http://www.suicidology.org/associations/1045/files/2005datapgs.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-03-24. 
9. ^ U.S. Suicide Rate Increasing Newswise, Retrieved on October 21, 2008.
10. ^ "WHO Statement: World Suicide Prevention Day 2008" (PDF). World Health Organization. 2008. http://www.who.int/entity/mental_health/prevention/suicide/wspd_2008_statement.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-10-26. 
11. ^ ^{a b} radical cartographers unite
12. ^ Lester, Patterns, Table 3.3, pp. 31-33
13. ^ Barraclough BM (1987). "Sex ratio of juvenile suicide". J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 26 (3): 434–5. doi:10.1097/00004583-198705000-00027. http://journals.lww.com/jaacap/Abstract/1987/05000/Sex_Ratio_of_Juvenile_Suicide.27.aspx. 
14. ^ "China's suicide rate roaring". Straits Time. 2008. http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_312205.html. 
15. ^ Country reports and charts available, World Health Organization. Retrieved March 16, 2008.
16. ^ Lester, Patterns, 1996, p. 22
17. ^ La Vecchia C, Lucchini F, Levi F (July 1994). "Worldwide trends in suicide mortality, 1955-1989". Acta Psychiatr Scand 90 (1): 53–64. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0447.1994.tb01556.x. PMID 7976451. ; Lester, Patterns, 1996, pp. 28-30.
18. ^ Hoyert DL, Heron MP, Murphy SL, Kung HC (April 2006). "Deaths: final data for 2003" (PDF 3.72 MB). Natl Vital Stat Rep 54 (13): 1–120. PMID 16689256. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_13.pdf. 
19. ^ "Are Suicide Rates Higher at Christmas?" (PDF). Centre For Suicide Prevention. 1995. http://www.suicideinfo.ca/csp/assets/alert16.pdf. 
20. ^ Amazeen, Sandy. "Book Review: Cliffs of Despair A Journey to Suicide's Edge," Monsters & Critics.December 21, 2005
21. ^ "Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge". The New Yorker. 2003. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/13/031013fa_fact. Retrieved on October 24 2006. 
22. ^ "'Suicide forest' yields 78 corpses". Japan Times. 2003-02-07. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/member/member.html?nn20030207b1.htm. Retrieved on 2008-09-16. 
23. ^ "Beachy Head - Suicide Spot". BBC Inside Out. 2003-06-23. http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/southeast/series3/beachy_head_suicide_eastbourne.shtml. Retrieved on 2009-04-22. 
24. ^ "U.S. Suicide Statistics (2005)". http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html. Retrieved on 2008-03-24. 
25. ^ Bertolote JM, Fleischmann A, De Leo D, Wasserman D (2004). "Psychiatric diagnoses and suicide: revisiting the evidence". Crisis 25 (4): 147–55. PMID 15580849. 
26. ^ Arsenault-Lapierre G, Kim C, Turecki G (2004). "Psychiatric diagnoses in 3275 suicides: a meta-analysis". BMC Psychiatry 4: 37. doi:10.1186/1471-244X-4-37. PMID 15527502. 
27. ^ Colt, George Howe (1991). The enigma of suicide. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 343. ISBN 0-671-76071-8. 
    Hendin, Herbert (1982). Suicide in America. New York: Norton. pp. 189–90. ISBN 0-393-01517-3. 
28. ^ B. R. Green, and D. R Irish, eds., Death Education: Preparation for Living (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971), 120, quoted in Suicide and attempted suicide by Geo Stone
29. ^ Suetonius claims that Nero committed suicide in Suetonius, The Lives of Twelve Caesars, Life of Nero 49; Sulpicius Severus, who possibly used Tacitus' lost fragments as a source, reports that is was uncertain whether Nero committed suicide, Sulpicius Severus, Chronica II.29, also see T.D. Barnes, "The Fragments of Tacitus' Histories", Classical Philology (1977), p.228
30. ^ Watson, Bruce (2007). Exit Rommel: The Tunisian Campaign, 1942-43. Stackpole Books. p. 170. ISBN 9780811733816. 
31. ^ American Association of Suicidology - Survivors^{[dead link]}
32. ^ [1] International Suicide Prevention.
33. ^ Giannini, Matthew C.; Slaby, Andrew Edmund (1982). Handbook of overdose and detoxification emergencies. [New Hyde Park, N.Y.]: Medical Examination Pub. Co. ISBN 0-87488-182-X. 
34. ^ Appel, JM. (2007). "A Suicide Right for the Mentally Ill? A Swiss Case Opens a New Debate". Hastings Center Report 37 (3): 21–23. doi:10.1353/hcr.2007.0035. PMID 17649899. 
35. ^ "Laws - IPC - Section 309". Vakilno1.com. 2006-10-10. http://www.vakilno1.com/bareacts/IndianPenalCode/S309.htm. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
36. ^ "German politician Roger Kusch helped elderly woman to die" Times Online July 2,2008
37. ^ Dr. Ronald Roth, D.Acu.. "Suicide & Euthanasia - a Biblical Perspective". Acu-cell.com. http://www.acu-cell.com/suicide.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
38. ^ "Norman N. Holland, Literary Suicides: A Question of Style". Clas.ufl.edu. http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nholland/suicide.htm. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
39. ^ "Catechism of the Catholic Church - PART 3 SECTION 2 CHAPTER 2 ARTICLE 5". Scborromeo.org. 1941-06-01. http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a5.htm#2280. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
40. ^ "The Sin of Suicide, Aquinas". Csulb.edu. 1996-08-28. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/452_r4.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
41. ^ "Catechism of the Catholic Church - PART 3 SECTION 2 CHAPTER 2 ARTICLE 5". Scborromeo.org. 1941-06-01. http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a5.htm#2282. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
42. ^ "The Bible and Suicide". Religioustolerance.org. http://www.religioustolerance.org/sui_bibl.htm. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
43. ^ "Euthanasia and Judaism: Jewish Views of Euthanasia and Suicide". ReligionFacts.com. http://www.religionfacts.com/euthanasia/judaism.htm. Retrieved on 2008-09-16. 
44. ^ Suicide Bombing in Islam -(Submission)- Going to Heaven or to Hell ?Jihad in Islam (Submission)- War system in Islam
45. ^ Hindu Website. Hinduism and suicide
46. ^ By SIMON ROBINSON (Sunday, Mar. 27, 2005). "Europe's Way of Death". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901050404-1042414,00.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
47. ^ Schopenhauer | On Suicide^{[dead link]}
48. ^ "Suicide (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/. Retrieved on 2009-05-06. 
49. ^ [2]^{[dead link]}

Further reading

• Gambotto, Antonella (2004). The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide. Australia: Broken Ankle Books. pp. 197pgs. ISBN 0-975-1075-1-8. 
• Jamison, Kay Redfield (2000). Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. New York: Vintage. pp. 448pgs. 
• Simpson, George Gaylord; Durkheim, Emile (1997). Suicide: a study in sociology. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-83632-7. 
• McDowell, Eugene E.; Stillion, Judith M. (1996). Suicide across the life span: premature exits. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 1-56032-304-3. 
• Stone, Geo (2001). Suicide and attempted suicide. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0940-5. 
• Hakim, David (2008). Man Down CineSource Magazine. 

External links

• American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
• Suicide at the Open Directory Project
• Stamp Out Suicide! Information resource for those in the UK and Ireland
• Avshalom Elitzur and Haim Omer, What Would You Say to the Person on the Roof?, with comments from Israel Orbach

v • d • e Death and related topics In medicine Autopsy · Brain death · Clinical death · Euthanasia · Lazarus Syndrome · Persistent vegetative state · Terminal illness Lists Causes of death by rate · Preventable causes of death · People by cause of death · List of expressions related to death  · Notable deaths in 2007 · Notable deaths in 2008 Mortality Immortality · Perinatal mortality · Infant mortality · Child mortality · Legal death · Maternal death · Mortality rate After death Body: Burial · Cremation · Cryonics · Promession · Resomation · Mummification · Decomposition · Death certificate · Funeral · Grief · Mourning · Category:Customs · Afterlife · Intermediate state Paranormal Out-of-body experience · Near-death experience · Near-death studies · Reincarnation research · Séance Other Murder · Genocide · Suicide · Assisted suicide · Fascination with death · Martyrdom · Sacrifices (Human · Animal) · War · Personification of Death · Death and culture · Category:Death by country Legal Wills · Trust · Estate

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - selvmord, selvmorder
v. intr. - begå selvmord

idioms:

• commit suicide    begå selvmord
• suicide pact    selvmordspagt

Nederlands (Dutch)
zelfmoord, zelfmoordenaar

Français (French)
n. - (lit, fig) suicide
v. intr. - se suicider

idioms:

• commit suicide    se suicider
• suicide pact    engagement de se suicider ensemble

Deutsch (German)
n. - Selbstmord, Selbstmörder
v. - Selbstmord verüben

idioms:

• commit suicide    Selbstmord verüben
• suicide pact    Selbstmordpakt

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αυτοκτονία, αυτοχειρία, αυτόχειρας
v. - αυτοκτονώ

idioms:

• commit suicide    αυτοκτονώ
• suicide pact    συμφωνία για ταυτόχρονη αυτοκτονία

Italiano (Italian)
suicidio, suicida

idioms:

• commit suicide    suicidarsi
• suicide pact    patto suicida

Português (Portuguese)
n. - suicídio (m)
v. - suicidar-se

idioms:

• commit suicide    suicidar-se
• suicide pact    pacto de suicídio

Русский (Russian)
самоубийство, суицид, самоубийца, провал планов, крах надежд по собственной вине

idioms:

• commit suicide    по своей вине потерять положение в обществе
• suicide pact    групповое самоубийство по сговору

Español (Spanish)
n. - suicidio, suicida
v. intr. - suicidarse

idioms:

• commit suicide    suicidarse, matarse
• suicide pact    pacto suicida

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - självmord
v. - begå självmord

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
试图自杀者, 自杀性行为, 自毁, 自杀

idioms:

• commit suicide    自杀
• suicide pact    二人以上约定一同自杀的, 自杀合约

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 試圖自殺者, 自殺性行為, 自毀
v. intr. - 自殺

idioms:

• commit suicide    自殺
• suicide pact    二人以上約定一同自殺的, 自殺合約

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 자살 , 자살 행위, 자살자
v. intr. - 자살하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 自殺, 自殺行為, 自殺者, 自殺的行為

idioms:

• suicide pact    心中

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) انتحار (فعل) ينتحر‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮התאבדות, מתאבד, מעשה או מסלול של הרס עצמי‬
v. intr. - ‮התאבד‬

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