I’ve seen this story come in multiple variations over the years, but it basically goes a teenager is washing her baby sister in a bathtub when she gets a phone call and goes to the other room for a few minutes. She comes back to find the baby floating dead in the tub. In both grief but also fear of punishment the older sister commits suicide in the same bathroom. Then the mom comes into the room and sees both her children dead and out of sudden grief kills herself too. Then when the father comes home from work and sees all the dead bodies in the bathroom then he commits suicide out of grief. Finally a grand parent cones home to all of this, sees this and kills themselves too.
I was curious if a suicide chain has ever actually happened, multiple suicides all happening because a previous person committed suicide. However mass suicide where a bunch of people committ suicide over the same reason, or are “forced” to commit suicide dont count.
I don’t know how long of a ‘chain’ is really a chain (or how quick) but the scenario as pictured seems very melodramatic, with its succession of instant and unthinking reactions.
I do personally know someone who killed herself because her daughter committed suicide (some weeks later), and I think that kind of attenuated chain is sadly not rare (this is why they try not to talk about suicide in death notices, right? Because suicidal ideation is in some ways catching)
I don’t know if the ‘copycat’ suicides require the same method, but my junior year of high school there were five ‘successful’ suicides in my class of only 400 students over the course of just two months.
All of the students knew each other, sometimes just in the ‘we’ve shared classes’ or ‘I’ve seen him in the hallways’, level but none were BFFs or lifelong pals or anything. The first death was by hanging, the second deliberately drove his car into the stone pillar of a bridge, then two people took pills/alcohol, and finally a gun shot. Four left notes, just general ‘I hate my life’ or ‘I can’t take it anymore’ stuff. A couple were the kids who often got bullied, one had just broken up with his girl friend AND been kicked off the football team, one girl had been depressed for a long time and had just started taking a new antidepressant, and nobody really knew why for the car death.
The town and parents were having fits, the school admin was bringing in extra counselors and having assemblies and whatall about not using permanent solutions for temporary problems and such. Other than that streak, nobody in our class died during Freshman, Sophomore or the rest of Junior year. (One girl died in Senior year, but that was due to cancer.)
One counselor describe it to me as a ‘contagion’ effect. Lots and lots of HS students are under stress, maybe all of them to some degree, between adolescence and school pressure and family difficulties or lots of things. But kids don’t normally kill themselves, because it’s “unthinkable.” But then another kid, someone basically just like them, DOES kill themselves and it’s suddenly quite thinkable. And then the second death makes the trigger level even lower for the third, and the fourth…
And then it just stopped. Maybe a weird type of ‘herd immunity.’ The kids at the worst risk had cleared themselves out, and any who might have been somewhat in danger got the help they’d needed from the counselors and people near them paying attention and just didn’t.
Supposedly there was a bunch of suicides in the 1930s, especially in Hungary, after the release of a song called “Gloomy Sunday” by a Hungarian composer, said to be irresistibly depressing. One suspects the total of deaths was inflated by urban legend and credulous reporting.
The original version is accessible on YouTube, with disclaimers and warnings to turn back before listening to it (if you don’t understand Hungarian, you’re probably safe). For those willing to chance it, there’s the Billie Holiday recording, which was banned by the BBC for many years starting in WWII (when it was considered detrimental to wartime morale).
