CHAPTER VIII.

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 ─────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴────────