History of suicide
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| Suicide |
|---|
| History of suicide |
| List of suicides |
| Views on suicide |
| Medical | Cultural |
| Legal | Philosophical |
| Religious | Right to die |
| Suicide crisis |
| Intervention | Prevention |
| Crisis hotline | Suicide watch |
| Types of suicide |
| Suicide by method | Copycat suicide |
| Cult suicide | Euthanasia |
| Forced suicide | Internet suicide |
| Mass suicide | Murder-suicide |
| Ritual suicide | Suicide attack |
| Suicide pact | Teenage suicide |
| Related phenomena |
| Parasuicide | Self-harm |
| Suicidal ideation | Suicide note |
Suicide has been committed by people from all walks of life since the beginning of known history. Among the famous who have taken their own lives are Socrates, Boudicca, Brutus, Mark Antony, Cleopatra VII of Egypt, Judas Iscariot, Hannibal, Nero, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Ernest Hemingway, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath, Marina Tsvetaeva, Yukio Mishima, Hunter S. Thompson, Ludwig Boltzmann, Vincent van Gogh, and Marilyn Monroe.
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[edit] Military
In ancient times, suicide sometimes followed defeat in battle, to avoid capture and possible subsequent torture, mutilation, or enslavement by the enemy. The Caesarean assassins Brutus and Cassius, for example, killed themselves after their defeat at the battle of Philippi. Insurgent Jews died in a mass suicide at Masada in 74 CE rather than face enslavement by the Romans.
During World War II, Japanese units would often fight to the last man rather than surrender. Towards the end of the war, the Japanese navy sent kamikaze pilots to attack Allied ships. These tactics reflect the influence of the samurai warrior culture, where seppuku was often required after a loss of honor. It is also suggested that the Japanese treated Allied POWs harshly because, in Japanese eyes, by surrendering rather than fighting to the last man, these soldiers showed they were not worthy of honorable treatment. In fact, the Japanese unit in Singapore sentenced an Australian bombing unit to death in admiration for their bravery.
In modern times, suicide attacks have been used extensively by Islamist Militants.
Spies have carried suicide pills or pins to use when captured, partly to avoid the misery of captivity, but also to avoid being forced to disclose secrets. For the latter reason, spies may even have orders to kill themselves if captured – for example, Gary Powers had a suicide pin, but did not use it when he was captured.
[edit] Personal honor
In Roman society, suicide was an accepted means by which honor could be preserved. Those charged with capital crimes, for example, could prevent confiscation of their family's estate by taking their own lives before being convicted in court. It was sardonically said of the emperor Domitian that his way of showing mercy was to allow a condemned man to take his own life.
[edit] Social protest
The Kaiowas tribe in the South American rainforest committed a mass suicide in protest of a government that was taking away their land and beliefs. This only succeeded because of massive international and national attention; whereas, this would typically fail because everyone supporting the social protest would be dead and that land would be taken regardless.
In the 1960s, Buddhist monks, most notably Thích Quảng Đức, in South Vietnam gained Western praise in their protests against President Ngô Đình Diệm by burning themselves to death. Similar events were reported in eastern Europe, such as Jan Palach following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1970 Greek Geology student Kostas Georgakis burned himself to death in Genoa, Italy to protest against the Greek military junta of 1967-1974.
[edit] Periods of persecution
During the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), numerous publicly-known figures, especially intellectuals and writers, are reported to have committed suicide, typically to escape persecution, typically at the hands of the Red Guards. Some, or perhaps many, of these reported suicides are suspected by many observers to have, in fact, not been voluntary but instead the result of mistreatment. Some reported suicides include famed writer Lao She, among the best-known 20th century Chinese writers, and journalist Fan Changjiang.
[edit] Philosophers' views on Suicide
- Goethe's published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) in the late 18th century. It is a romantic story about a young man who kills himself because his love proves unattainable. The story was reputed to have caused a wave of suicides in Germany.
- Arthur Schopenhauer would be expected to take the subject seriously, due to his bleak view of life. His main work – The World as Will and Representation – constantly uses the act in its examples. He denied that suicide was immoral and saw it as one's right to take their life. In an interesting allegory, he compared ending one's life, when under great suffering, to waking up from sleep, when experiencing a terrible nightmare. However, most suicides were seen as an act of the will, as it takes place when one denies life's pains and is thus different from ascetic renunciation of the will, which denies life's pleasures. His ideas become confused when he talks about ascetic suicides; in one part, he claims that ascetic suicide can only occur through starvation, whilst, in another part, he talks of how ascetics have fed themselves to crocodiles and been buried alive. This seems somewhat contradictory – but it is clear that, all in all, Schopenhauer had sympathy for those who commit suicide.
- David Hume left an essay on suicide to be published after his death. Most of it is concerned with the idea that it is an affront to God. He argued that it was no more a rebellion against God than to save the life of someone who would otherwise die or to change anything else in the environment's position. He spent much less time dismissing arguments that it was an affront to duty to others or to oneself. He said that it could be compared to retiring from society and becoming a total recluse, which is not normally considered to be immoral – although this comparison of his would not seem to justify a suicide that left children or dependents vulnerable, in its wake. As for duty to self, he saw it as obvious that there would be times when it would be desirable not to continue living and thought it ridiculous that anyone would consider suicide unless they had considered every other option first.
- Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, published in 1897 his now famous study Suicide which argued that suicide rates are related to rates of social integration and social regulation. In it, he stated there are four types of suicide: egoistic suicide, altruistic suicide, anomic suicide, and fatalistic suicide.
- G.K. Chesterton called suicide "the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence". He argued that a person who killed himself, as far as they were concerned, destroyed the entire world.
- Albert Camus saw the goal of existentialism in establishing whether suicide was necessary in a world without God.
- Al Alvarez, a poet, wrote a study of suicide in literature entitled The Savage God.
- Jean Améry, in his book On Suicide: a Discourse on Voluntary Death (originally published in German in 1976), provides a moving insight into the suicidal mind. He argues forcefully and almost romantically that suicide represents the ultimate freedom of humanity, attempting to justify the act with phrases such as "we only arrive at ourselves in a freely chosen death", lamenting the "ridiculously everyday life and its alienation". He killed himself in 1978.
- William Godwin showed his extreme optimism by stating that suicide was almost always a mistake, as more pleasure is to be gained by living. As he was a utilitarian, who saw moral judgements as based on the pleasure and pain they produced, he thus thought suicide to be immoral.
