Suicide

The term suicide comes from the Latin sui caedere (“to kill oneself”), which is the act of willfully ending one's own life. Originally, the word was used in the context of someone committing suicide, but now has come to be the verb with someone “suiciding,” and “a suicide” being not only the act but also, sometimes, describing the person.

The reasons for someone committing suicide can be many. These may include people who are either suffering from great pain, or expect to be; people suffering from stress, especially grief or guilt after a death, gambling debts, and so forth; people trying to escape judicial punishment; people suffering from mental illness; or for extreme military, political, or terrorist purposes.

The first of these reasons involves people in great physical or emotional pain, or expecting to suffer from pain, including those who have been diagnosed with incurable diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, or other debilitating diseases, including paralysis, disfigurement, and/or loss of a limb. With many of these people wanting to commit suicide, this has been an extremely contentious area with arguments by ethicists over whether it should be a crime to help such people to end their lives, that is, to commit suicide.

Stress resulting from grief, especially after a death, a major disaster, or guilt over something has also been a major cause of suicide. This can also have resulted from financial losses, especially from people suffering from gambling addictions, loss of job, or loss of assets (especially the family house) through business failure, or having lost money through a fall in stock market prices, such as on Wall Street in 1929. Often a person committing suicide for this reason does so in grief or shame, and may do so because of their inability to face their family or friends, and because of fear of the future without someone or assets. Most medical professionals feel that these people would not commit suicide if they had access to appropriate counselors, either professionals or members of their family, or friends.

Suicide has occasionally been seen as a method of avoiding judicial punishment such as felons killing themselves by shooting, crashing their car, jumping over an abyss, and so forth, when they do not see a way of escaping from the police or other law enforcement officials. [Page 1628]Although this can be committed by people trying to avoid capital punishment, it might also be a person who would otherwise face a long term in prison.

Large numbers of prisoners also commit suicide in prison because of the treatment they have received or to end the boredom of incarceration. Other prisoners have been known to commit suicide just prior to being executed: German politician Herman Goering killed himself by poison in 1946 to avoid being hanged and French collaborationist leader Pierre Laval tried to commit suicide to prevent his execution. There have also been many leaders since ancient times who have committed suicide to escape capture: Mark Anthony and Queen Boadicea being two from the ancient world; Adolf Hitler and Yukio Mishima being two from the 20th century.

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