Suicide overview

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Editor-In-Chief: C. Michael Gibson, M.S., M.D. [1]

Overview

Suicide (Latin suicidium, from sui caedere, to kill oneself) is primarily the act of intentionally ending one's own life, though it is also used as a metaphor for the "willful destruction of one's self-interest" either as an individual or as a group. Suicide may occur for a number of reasons, including depression, shame, pain, financial difficulties, or other undesirable situations. Nearly one million people worldwide die by suicide annually. There are an estimated 10 to 20 million attempted suicides every year.

Views on suicide have been influenced by cultural views on existential themes such as religion, honor, and the meaning of life. Most Western and some Asian religions—the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism—consider suicide a dishonorable act; in the West it was regarded as a serious crime and an offense towards God due to religious belief in the sanctity of life. 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 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 was a Hindu funeral practice in which the widow would immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

Medically assisted suicide (euthanasia, or the right to die) is 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. Suicide is sometimes interpreted in this framework as a "cry for help" and attention, or to express despair and the wish to escape, rather than a genuine intent to die. Most people who attempt suicide do not complete suicide on a first attempt; those who later gain a history of repetitions are significantly more at risk of eventual completion.

Historical Perspective

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, Sadeq Hedayat, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Ernest Hemingway, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath, Marina Tsvetaeva, Yukio Mishima, Hunter S. Thompson, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Cobain, and Vincent van Gogh.