THE CAUSATION OF SUICIDE.
In considering this portion of our subject we shall be assisted by
analogy, if we investigate the data of contributing causes, in a manner
similar to that which is ordinarily pursued with regard to diseases, in
textbooks of medicine.
I refer to the method of distributing these causes into two classes of
predisposing influences, and exciting or determining causes.
It will be very necessary, however, to bear in mind that the onset of
a disease is generally of a nature quite removed from the influence of
the will; while, on the other hand, suicide is voluntary, the result
of a distinct action, following a direct determination. It is the
determination which is led up to by states of predisposition, whether
they be cosmic, racial, or mental.
One large class, perhaps one-third of all suicides, are of a different
nature; these are the effect of an insane act; the predisposition is
lunacy; the determining cause is a delusion, hallucination, mania, or
epileptic nerve storm.
The group of influences which we shall consider as predisposing, must
in the case of insane suicides be considered as the predisposing
causes of the unsoundness of mind.
And, again, the causes denoted as exciting, in these pages, are also
the exciting causes of the insanity in most cases. From this point of
view, the fact of Suicide is only an incident occurring in Lunacy.
The various forms of insanity, and their influence in promoting
suicide, their treatment, and the means of avoiding the fatal act, will
be referred to, later on.
M. Casimir Broussais, in his work “Hygiène Morale,” divides the causes
thus:─
A. Circumstances independent of the will.
B. Voluntary causes.
In Class A. he recounts: individual organisation, heredity, sex, age,
state of health, or disease, country, climate, seasons, historical
epochs.
In Class B. he places employment, education, misery, loss of fortune,
gambling, disappointed love, jealousy, domestic troubles, calumny,
wounded self-love, failure of ambition, remorse, religious and
political fanaticism, imitation.
M. Tissot, in his treatise on our subject, proposes the following
arrangement of the causes of suicide:
1. Remote negative causes, such are want of religion and want of
morality.
2. Remote positive causes; either physiological, moral, or physical.
3. Proximate physical causes.
4. Proximate moral causes, either public or personal.
But he adds, “many of these causes act concurrently; it is indeed rare
not to find this to be the case.”
In Class 2 he places: Physiological, the power of reflection. Moral:
idleness, bad company, gambling, debauchery, theatrical plays, evil
imaginings, evil literature; and Physical: insanity, hypochondriasis,
ennui, nostalgia, alcoholism, celibacy, with such data as climate, age,
temperament, heredity.
To Class 3 he allots bodily diseases, pain, misery, privation, slavery,
loss of fortune, fear of punishment, and envy.
In Class 4, under personal, he places, offended vanity, despair,
remorse, suicide to expiate a fault, suicide to secure virtue or
personal purity or honour, impatience to obtain the future life, and
the vanity of dying for nothing. Under public causes he classes suicide
to save public honour of a government, to avenge the disgrace of one’s
country, to defend the honour of others, and suicide in despair of the
state of public affairs.
Despine, in his Natural Psychology, vol. iii., pp. 74-132, divides
Insane Suicides into four series:
I.─Death occurs from an act proposed by the delusion of delirium; as
if a man should jump off a high place thinking he is able to fly.
(Delirium.)
II.─Self-destruction from Lypemania, producing a state of such
sorrow and fear that the sentiment of attachment to life is lost.
(Melancholia.)
III.─Suicide is performed to obtain death, simply from the desire to
die. (Suicidal Monomania.)
IV.─The sufferer is caused by his malady to be violent and to destroy
someone, either himself or others. (Acute Mania.)
He then proceeds to study suicides, in persons of healthy mind, “sous
l’influence d’un cerveau sain.” It is determined by passions which
arise from noble and generous sentiments, whilst homicide depends on
egotistical and perverse passions. He divides into three series the
passions determining suicide:
I.─Those occurring during rage or violent passion, incompatible with
free will.
II.─In such a psychical state, that the man morally free, does not
decide by free-will. Placed between two modes of action, imposed on
him by circumstances; and of which one is so repugnant to his feelings
that he takes the other which is less repugnant, viz., suicide.
III.─In the state of moral liberty, in which the man decides on his
action by his free will.
He then gives as causes, despair, ennui, alcoholism, religion, loss of
honour, to escape execution, misery, self-sacrifice, and stoicism.
The older authors on Suicide only viewed it from a narrative and
sentimental point of view, and it is only of late years that it has
been the object of any scientific research; but now that a study of
suicide, as a fact, has been instituted, it has fallen almost entirely
into a statistical groove, to the neglect of research into the mental
state and emotions of the unfortunate individuals who become victims.
Suicide is an individual act, and this point is in danger of being
lost sight of in a too absorbing study of general principles.
Most copious and elaborate investigations have been made into the
proportional intensity of cosmic, telluric, climatic, and racial
states, as causes of Suicide, to the neglect of the fact that men and
women are not simply automatons, and that mental and moral causes act
in different fashions on different minds more certainly than data
of temperature, geological formation, and position of the sun. Than
Morselli, no man has contributed more information on the subject of
Suicide; but he is so far led on by his devotion to figures, that
he actually assigns as a cause of suicide and as a factor in its
prevalence, the relative position of the Sun and Earth, the alternating
states of Aphelion and Perihelion!
I am under great obligation to continental observers, for in the
ensuing pages I quote frequently from their statistics, viz., from
Œttingen, Wagner, Falret, Quetelet, Brierre de Boismont, Drobisch,
Legoyt, Lisle, and from Morselli of Turin, who supplies the most recent
data.
Among predisposing influences will be mentioned, the effects of race,
religion, education, and morality; together with those of climate, and
the geographical peculiarities of a country.
The varying proportions exhibited by the differences of age, sex, and
social condition; the effects of town as compared with country life,
and the special characteristics of the military and naval services, and
of prison life, will be described.
In respect to social life, mention will be found of the states of
celibacy, matrimony, and widowed life; and also some special reference
to suicide in childhood.
In our consideration of determining causes we shall be guided by the
scheme of tabulation in use in many continental states, because it
affords a better means of comparison between the several data, than
if any independent arrangement were suggested. This scheme divides
these final causes into three main classes, of mental diseases, bodily
diseases, and moral or immoral motives, as follows:
A.─Mental Affections. _See special Chapter_; including Insomnia,
Spiritualism, suicides caused by Imitation, and desire of Notoriety.
B.─Bodily diseases; Incurable diseases; pain, Alcoholism, Morphia
habit, and the effect of Hereditary predisposition.
C.─Tædium vitæ, nostalgia, etc.
D.─Violence of the passions; jealousy, anger, avarice, disappointed
love, spite.
E.─Effect of the Vices; libertinism, onanism, drunkenness.
F.─Domestic trouble, and anguish of the affections; loss of relatives,
deluded hopes, dissensions at home, want of children.
G.─Financial losses; loss of employment, gambling, loss of law suits.
H.─Misery, want of home and food, and fear of such want.
I.─Fear, shame, and remorse; seduction, unmarried pregnancy, the
haunting of a criminal’s conscience.
J.─Despair; this class is made to include unknown causes; to which may
be added:
K.─Honourable motives, yet misdirecting conduct.
Beyond all the predispositions, and states of disease, as causes of a
voluntary death, follow the consideration of the less tangible, but
terribly effectual moral motives, which have been briefly tabulated.
Volumes have been, and might still be written on the disastrous
effects of ungoverned passions, and ill-regulated desires, and their
consequences, guilt and shame, remorse and terror.
Volumes also might be contributed on the allied subjects of the misery
and pain, always present with us, and near us, and which but few of
us wholly escape contact with, or sharing. In these pages we must be
content with a notice of only the most frequent of those troubles.
As before observed, the suicides of eminent men in ancient history were
usually brought about by motives more or less honourable, if mistaken,
but practically, in our times, the final causes of the act are of a
less elevated character.
If we except the case of lunatics under protection, among whom the
proportion of suicides is small, from the care with which they are
watched, and the case of those in whom insanity bursts forth suddenly,
and without any warning, the catalogue of motives given above will be
found practically almost complete.
Brierre de Boismont gives the following classification of 4,595 cases
which occurred in France, assigning the mental or moral determining
causes.
But it is obvious that these tables must be taken _cum grano salis_,
because of the impossibility of discovering in every case the true
motive, and because of the coincidence of several causes in many
instances.
652 Lunatics, about one-seventh of all cases.
405 Other diseases of body, incurable, or with intolerable pain.
530 Alcoholism.
361 Domestic troubles.
311 Sorrow, disappointment.
134 Remorse, and fear of the law.
306 Disappointed love.
237 Ennui.
277 Reverses of fortune, and cupidity.
282 Poverty and misery.
55 Delirium of acute diseases.
44 Gambling.
43 Want of occupation.
26 Pride and vanity; notoriety.
56 Indolence.
145 Hypochondriac and hysterical.
54 Jealousy.
121 Misconduct.
556 Motive unknown.
Kolb, J. F., in his work on the “Condition of Nations,” gives the
following Table of Causation in respect to French Suicides; in a recent
year, 79 per cent. were males, and 21 per cent. were females.
From a total of 5,922 suicides, 1,794 were caused by mental disorders,
855 domestic troubles, 837 bodily diseases and pain, 701 alcoholism,
688 poverty and misery, 235 violence of the passions, 229 remorse, and
fear of the law, and 583 from motives unclassed.
Of 6,782 cases observed by Falret, the following proportions were
calculated by him: Caused by misery 1∕7, loss of fortune 1∕21, gambling
1∕43, love affairs 1∕19, domestic troubles 1∕9, fanaticism 1∕66,
calumny, wounded self-love, and failed ambition 1∕7, remorse 1∕27.
No attempt on a large scale has ever been made to tabulate English
cases, as to causation.
The following Table arranged by M. Lisle, has never been equalled, for
completeness, and for the large number of cases included in its scope.
FRENCH SUICIDES.─_Lisle._
─────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬────────
CAUSES. │ Male. │ Female. │ TOTAL.
─────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────
Misery │ 2,355 │ 587 │ 2,942
Debts, business embarrassments │ 2,809 │ 195 │ 3,004
Gambling │ 157 │ 1 │ 158
Loss of employment │ 237 │ 26 │ 263
Loss of law-suits │ 137 │ 19 │ 156
Other losses │ 332 │ 59 │ 391
Fear of poverty │ 264 │ 55 │ 319
Reverse of fortune │ 280 │ 45 │ 325
Regret for loss of fortune │ 63 │ 17 │ 80
Unrealised hope of fortune │ 53 │ 12 │ 65
Nostalgia │ 26 │ - │ 26
Loss of children, position, &c. │ 373 │ 193 │ 566
Bad conduct and ingratitude of children │ 137 │ 74 │ 211
Sorrow for absent children │ 20 │ 20 │ 40
Sorrow for absence from family │ 35 │ 16 │ 51
Sorrow of children for ill-treatment │ 159 │ 72 │ 231
Parental squabbles │ 110 │ 26 │ 136
Jealousy between members of a family │ 19 │ 7 │ 26
Other domestic troubles │ 3,355 │ 1,242 │ 4,597
Disappointed love │ 938 │ 627 │ 1,565
Jealousy │ 229 │ 118 │ 347
Pregnancy, unmarried │ - │ 239 │ 239
Disgust with marriage │ 35 │ 18 │ 53
Remorse │ 190 │ 77 │ 267
Idleness │ 76 │ 4 │ 80
Debauchery │ 1,569 │ 233 │ 1,802
Drunkenness │ 656 │ 82 │ 738
Habitual roguery │ 2,105 │ 359 │ 2,464
Disgust with social position │ 68 │ 9 │ 77
Desire to avoid legal pursuit │ 1,741 │ 365 │ 2,106
Desire to avoid execution of judgment │ 383 │ 21 │ 204
Desire to avoid military duty │ 266 │ - │ 266
Desire to avoid calumny │ 37 │ 27 │ 64
Desire to avoid pain │ 3,522 │ 1,165 │ 4,687
Disgust of life │ 1,547 │ 374 │ 1,921
Hypochondria │ 640 │ 211 │ 851
Disgust of military life │ 214 │ - │ 214
Reproaches of employers │ 106 │ 41 │ 147
Sorrow for loss of situation │ 53 │ 24 │ 77
Rivalry in business │ 8 │ - │ 8
Insanity, general │ 6,744 │ 3,982 │ 10,726
Insanity, partial, or monomania │ 603 │ 244 │ 847
Idiocy │ 510 │ 307 │ 817
Cerebral congestion │ 504 │ 177 │ 681
Passion │ 51 │ 17 │ 68
Political excitement │ 34 │ - │ 34
Religious fears │ 40 │ 28 │ 68
Suicide after crime │ 299 │ 28 │ 327
Unknown cause │ 5,121 │ 1,354 │ 6,745
├─────────┼─────────┼────────
│ 39,302 │ 12,824 │ 52,126
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