Explaining Suicide

Patterns, Motivations, and What Notes Reveal

Cheryl L. Meyer,Taronish Irani,Katherine A. Hermes,Betty Yung

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128095799
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The rate of suicides is at its highest level in nearly 30 years. Suicide notes have long been thought to be valuable resources for understanding suicide motivation, but up to now the small sample sizes available have made an in-depth analysis difficult. Explaining Suicide: Patterns, Motivations, and What Notes Reveal represents a large-scale analysis of suicide motivation across multiple ages during the same time period. This was made possible via a unique dataset of all suicide notes collected by the coroner's office in southwestern Ohio 2000–2009.

Based on an analysis of this dataset, the book identifies top motivations for suicide, how these differ between note writers and non-note writers, and what this can tell us about better suicide prevention. The book reveals the extent to which suicide is motivated by interpersonal violence, substance abuse, physical pain, grief, feelings of failure, and mental illness. Additionally, it discusses other risk factors, what differentiates suicide attempters from suicide completers, and lastly what might serve as protective factors toward resilience.

• Analyzes 1200+ suicide cases from one coroner's office
• Identifies the top motivations for suicide that are based on suicide notes
• Discusses the extent to which suicides are impulsive vs. planned
• Leads to a better understanding on how to prevent suicide
• Emphasizes resilience factors over risk factors

Chapter 1

The History and Theories of Suicide

Abstract

This chapter examines history and theories of suicide from the early modern period to the present. It examines changes in suicide practices, methods, and motivations. The suicides which occur in America today are consistent with those that occurred in the past. The historical focus will be on the peoples of North America who are of Native American, European, and African for the trends established there. Additionally, theories about who commits suicide and why are explained to establish the current state of the field of suicidology.

Keywords

History; theory; suicidology; African American; Native American; immigrants

The History of Suicide

Historians have explained the historical changes in suicide and attitudes toward it by focusing on culture, religion, and science. As this book is comprised of our study of contemporary, midwestern Americans, examined with other contemporary studies from the western world, the historical focus will be on the peoples of North America who are of Native American, European, and African descent in the early modern and modern eras, for the trends established there. In most books about suicide, one finds only a minimal historical account covering the period from the ancient world to the present, usually focused on legal, religious and medical changes, but few give serious examination to changes in suicide practices, methods, and motivations. Although we are unable to devote many pages to its history in this book, having an understanding of the history of suicide is vital to the mission of this book to help to prevent it.

Beginning with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of literacy, scholars have been able to study suicide not just anecdotally but statistically. England began to keep records in parishes and counties, and the country began to take an interest in suicide (MacDonald & Murphy, 1990). The suicide note also became something of a new phenomenon with the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. The protagonist in the novel, a sensitive and passionate artist, left a farewell note to his beloved that became a model for others (Minois, 1999). Suicide in the modern world became a subject of scientific inquiry. The communication of ideas about suicide in literature, art, newspapers, scholarly journals, public records, and the notes of the victims over the last 400 years provides us with a much fuller picture of suicide in this era than for any other time.

Over time, since the keeping of good records began in the 17th century, a strong continuity has existed in seasonal cycles of suicide. In the northern hemisphere, research has found both more violent suicides, those in which guns or knives are used, and more female suicides in the most significant seasonal peak, April through June. Conversely, more male and nonviolent suicides occur in the lesser peak of October through November (Brådvik, 2002). Religious and economic indicators have been less stable and predictable. Any biological predispositions are beyond our ability to identify or analyze. One trend is clear: as religious prohibitions against suicide were displaced, suicide has moved from the category of self-murder, and thus a crime, to a disease of the mind. This is not to say that religious belief has had no influence in the modern age; many Christians still think that suicide relegates their souls to eternal damnation, even though their churches officially have abandoned such views (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 1992; “On Mental Health Concerns and The Heart Of God,” 2013).

America’s history with respect to suicide can be divided into two periods: from 1492, when colonization began, to the post-Civil War years and Reconstruction to 1877; and from 1877 to the present. The years from 1492 to 1877 share some characteristics that are significant when discussing suicide. Until 1877, the United States was expanding, and for most of that period Native people were moved ever more westward, and finally enclosed on reservations. Africans and their descendants were enslaved until 1865, and thus constituted a special population; those who crossed on the Middle Passage (“saltwater slaves”) had different experiences with death, including suicide, than those born on plantations or in cities in the United States and its territories. European settlers before 1877 were often engaged in colonization and the formation of new communities, even after the English colonial period ended, as they moved westward into newly acquired lands. The status of master could belong to white men before 1865, but not thereafter. Until 1877, the South continued to feel the effects of the Civil War, as it was under military occupation.

Moreover, between 1492 and 1877, the treatment of suicide in law and medicine changed little. It was in most of the colonies, and later states, a felony to kill oneself. Yet coroners could and often did find victims of suicide to be non compos mentis, or mentally ill, rather than “felonious” (Acts And Laws … of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England, 1700; Jamison, 1999). Suicide or “self-murder” was considered a sin and crime similar to murder, adultery, and thievery, and often ministers condemned it as a willful act, but literature from the era also indicates that the clergy had begun to perceive a state of mind known as “melancholy” to be the cause of some suicides (Fox, 1709; Jamison, 1999).

After 1877, a society more recognizable to contemporary Americans began to arise. Indians had fought their last major battle at Little Bighorn in 1876; the reservation system was completed by 1890. African Americans were no longer enslaved, but a new system of oppression known as Jim Crow was emerging. Whites were no longer colonizing; immigrants who came after 1880 were settling in established places. The immigrant experience redefined whiteness and the so-called “American Dream.”

Likewise, the treatment of suicide in law and medicine modernized. The rise of psychoanalysis did not eliminate the shame of suicide, but it did place it in the realm of mental disease or defect, which led to decriminalization and eventually to religious institutions changing some teachings on suicide. Feminist scholars have argued that the acceptance of suicide as the product of mental illness meant that it went from being a masculinized “act of will” to a feminized, passive act which turned those who killed themselves into victims (Gentry, 2006). Willful suicide was still considered sinful, but any act in which the individual was not responsible, because of mental illness for instance, was not considered sinful. The Catholic Church, which has one of the strongest stances on suicide, says in its current Catechism (para. 2282), “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish or grave fear of hardship, suffering or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.” In this view, suicides are not to be condemned, but rather are to be pitied (Kheriaty, 2014).

Suicide From the Early Modern Period to the Post–Civil War Era

His homeland was changing. When he was a boy, Soranhes knew everyone in the lands around him. He was from the Huron village of Teanausteaiae, not far from Quebec. Now, in 1636, there were strange men, missionaries called “Black Robes,” who had arrived in Huronia from France some years before. His son, Amantacha, went by the new French name of Louys de Saincte Foy, and he followed the teachings of the Jesuit priests. Soranhes himself had allowed the missionaries to instruct him in their beliefs, and he had even stopped eating meat on some days of the week in preparation for baptism. He had second thoughts, however, and never underwent their initiation, which disappointed them. He continued to meet the Jesuit priests in his travels, and they continued to try to teach him, but he preferred to live according to the way he always had. Then, much to his great sorrow, his son died. He fell into a deep despair. Le Jeune (1636) describes it as follows:

One day, when he found himself alone in his cabin with one of his little daughters, he sent her to get a certain root that they call Ondachienroa, which is a quick poison. This child went for it very innocently, supposing that her father intended to make some medicine, as he had shown some slight indisposition. She brought him some, but not enough to suit him, and she returned for it the second time. He ate his fill of it; a high fever attacked him, and carried him off in a little while. But his relatives do not admit that he died in this way

(Thwaites, XIII, 1896–1901, p. 27).

The first records of suicide in North America were provided by Jesuit missionaries who lived among the Native Americans in the Great Lakes region, Maine and eastern Canada. In 1636 Father Le Jeune recorded the death of Soranhes, a chief of the Huron people, saddened that he died unconverted and “miserably” (p. 27). Pierre de Charlevoix, who preached to the Miami and Potawatomie Indians, claimed that Indian children would threaten suicide if they were reprimanded in a way that offended their dignity or humiliated them. Charlevoix asserted that girls in particular could not suffer correction from their mothers, and he thought they were motivated primarily by revenge against their parents. Yet he did not cite any specific examples of actual suicide occurring among that population. Threatening or attempting suicide is not the same as completing the act (as will be discussed later), so it is difficult to know if the Native people of Michigan experienced a suicide problem (Axtell, 1981). In Maine, however, suicides were completed at a rate that alarmed Catholic observers.

Grief, dishonor, unrequited love or bad marriages did result in suicide. Among the Micmac, Jesuits witnessed what they thought was a suicide epidemic. In 1691, 50 years after colonization, Le Clerq wrote about the terrible spate of suicides in his mission. The eastern seaboard, according to other accounts, saw frequent suicides among both Algonquian and Iroquoian people. Le Clerq attributed their motivation for suicide to “affronts,” especially those which “tarnish[ed] their honour and reputation” (Axtell, 1981, pp. 214–215). Like the Indians of Michigan, the Micmac used both poisonous herbs and strangulation to kill themselves. He described their melancholy as “so black and so profound that they become immersed wholly in a cruel despair” (p. 215). The priest espoused some sympathy for those who lost their true loves, but ultimately saw their deaths as examples of an impoverished, non-Christian culture. Nevertheless, his list of reasons for Micmac suicides resembles our own: humiliation from which there was no recovery, lost love, revenge, and grief. The Jesuits were learned men, and their taxonomies reflected both old religious categories and newer scientific ones. They were, though, oblivious to a degree about the many traumas that colonization inflicted on the Native people, such as the dramatic decline of their population from disease, the upending of gender roles, and the disruption to domestic life and the community caused by the fur trade. All of these situational elements could have been sources of severe depression (Pelletier, 1980). Ethnographer Fenton found that among the Iroquois, who like the Micmac were enmeshed in the fur trade, social disruption more than economic factors played the largest role in suicide (Fenton, 1986).

In many ways, what the Jesuits observed conforms to a theory advanced by modern scholars about relationship-related suicides and the concept of reciprocity. It is commonly understood by modern historians and ethnographers that Native Americans built their societies and relationships on reciprocity, whether it was in marriage proposals, in mourning wars to restore tribal numbers lost as a result of war or disease, or in trade with foreigners (Richter, 1992). Suicidologists have posited that when two parties engage in exchanges that are mutually beneficial based on a principle of reciprocity, it results in expectations that these benefits will be commensurate with what one party has given to the other. The exchange is predicated on fairness and equity. When one person in the relationship receives or perceives unfair treatment, distress and an attempt to restore balance results. It is possible that at least some of the suicides that took place in the eastern woodlands of North America in the 17th century were the result of something still prevalent today, a desire to correct an imbalance in a relationship (Davis, Callanan, Lester, & Haines, 2009).

In colonial British North America, suicide was generally seen as the problem of “the Other.” Articles in colonial newspapers noted the nationalities of the suicides featured in their pages, people such as Frenchmen and Danes. They also described how certain cultures refrained from suicide, such as the Romans, or how even notorious convicts eschewed it as dishonorable. When rumors swirled that Englishmen had a high rate of suicide, colonial newspapers disagreed, positing that the French were far more likely than the English to kill themselves. (“London, April 6,” New York Gazette, July 1, 1751; “Dublin, April 15,” Boston News-Letter, July 10–17, 1740; “The Continuation of Our Last,” New York Weekly Journal, Apr. 9, 1739; “London, October 13 Extract of a Letter from Paris, October 1, 1783,” Connecticut Courant, Feb. 24, 1784.)

Yet the very first recorded possible suicide in New England was that of Dorothy Bradford, wife of William Bradford, and one of the original Pilgrims. On December 7, 1620, Dorothy “fell” off the Mayflower and into the icy waters off the coast of modern-day Provincetown, Massachusetts. Dorothy Bradford was the daughter of a member of the English Church of Amsterdam, and historians dispute whether her fall was an accident or a suicide. Some scholars claim she “jumped to her death” because she was “unable to reconcile her vision of utopia with the wilderness of the American shore” (Peters, 2014, p. 64), while others say no evidence exists to support the assertion (Galisteo, 2007). Bradford himself was silent about his wife’s death.

Suicide as a result of religious despair was not unknown to the colonists. Jonathan Edwards, America’s foremost theologian, recorded the death of his uncle, Joseph Hawley, who “laid violent hands to himself, and put an end to his life, by cutting his own throat” (Sederholm, 2012, p. 326). Edwards wrote that his uncle had suffered from “melancholy,” but he saw in his uncle’s death a more general despair, in which he imagined “the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us” (p. 326). Edwards worried that more suicides would follow (Sederholm, 2012).

Edwards wrote of his uncle’s death in 1736 during a religious revival, the first of the revivals now known as the First Great Awakening. After a little more than a decade, the zeal of the “awakening” was fading. One Tuesday in January, 1750, a man in Dorchester, Massachusetts, hanged himself at the cider mill. He was a very wealthy bachelor of about 40, but the newspaper had no information about his motives, observing only that it was the second suicide in a few weeks (“Boston,” New York Gazette, Feb. 5, 1750). Then as now, suicide could occur in clusters. Point clusters are multiple suicides that approximate one another in both time and space and are often attributed to direct social learning from nearby individuals (Mesoudi, 2009; Stack, 2003). Newspapers, then as now, could play a dangerous role in suicide reporting, as clusters arise when suicides get attention. Today, details of suicide are held back in order to try to prevent clusters, but in earlier times, editors were unaware of the association between media coverage and suicide (Gould, Kleinman, Lake, Forman, & Midle, 2014).

“Well-to-do” Congregationalists in New England were not the only ones to experience melancholy. Enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage threw themselves overboard or refused to eat. The population most likely to commit suicide was older men, according to the records of slavers, but ships’ logs show an African captive suicide rate of 7.2% (Snyder, 2010). In New England a female slave, working alone in her master’s household, cut herself open, saying she wanted to go home. Many of the enslaved believed that suicide would return them to their home in Africa (Piersen, 1977). During the antebellum era, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison represented slave suicide as “fatalistic suicide,” the result of cultural oppression rather than as an act of resistance (Bell, 2012). Historians have assumed, based on Durkheim’s (1897, 2006) sociology of suicide, that once enslaved people were in America, community formation helped prevent suicide, but current research suggests that assumption may be incorrect. Snyder posited in her examination of “slave suicide ecology” that killing oneself could be a supreme act of resistance, but also material circumstances, psychological factors, and emotional reasons impelled some enslaved people to take their own lives (Snyder, 2010).

The master–slave relationship was a form of intimate relationship, and suicides that took place within that relationship are complex. Slavery ended in the United States in 1865 and in its last western bastion, Brazil, in 1888. After slavery, African–American rates of suicide were and remain lower than those of whites. For the period during slavery, however, it is impossible to have reliable data on a large scale. For the enslaved person, suicid...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The History and Theories of Suicide
• Chapter 2. Findings
• Chapter 3. Suicide Motivated by Interpersonal Relationships
• Chapter 4. Escape as a Motivation for Suicide
• Chapter 5. Grief and Failure
• Chapter 6. The Complexity of Suicide Motivation
• Chapter 7. Severe Mental Illness
• Chapter 8. The Intersection of Suicide and Legal Issues
• Chapter 9. Protective Factors and Resilience
• Chapter 10. Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix A. Detailed Methodology
• Appendix B. Coding Information
• References
• Index