I am wondering how common suicides were historically. I know that Socrates might be the most famous ancient suicide but he did not kill himself because of depression but more so to make a point. In Roman times, people killed themselves to avoid having their family property confiscated by the state if they were accused of treason.
In modern times, suicide is predominantly associated with depression. How common were these types of suicides in the past?
Socrates did not commit suicide; he was sentenced to death and given the option to take the poison in prison (had he refused, he would certainly have been executed by some other, probably less dignifying method).
Plenty of famous people in antiquity did commit (sometimes assisted) suicide, for example Mithridates, Hannibal and Nero; usually to avoid falling into the hands of their enemies.
There were many copy-cat suicides following the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. In the novel, Werther killed himself having been rejected by a woman and it became a thing to mimic his dress (yellow pants and blue coat) and shoot yourself.* I know you didn’t ask about copy-cat suicides per se, but it does point out one historical time in which suicides were, well, I don’t know if common is the right word, but happened.
Details here.
*Whether or not wearing that god-awful colour combination causes suicidal thoughts has not been established, to the best of my knowledge.
Point taken with regards to Socrates.
Nero did not commit suicide, he was killed by his servant by his own command because he could not do it himself. A fine point I admit. His enemies were the Senate of Rome not an outside force. He did not want his family to lose their property.
Suicide was not uncommon in the Japanese military during WWII when things went pear-shaped:
Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, suffered from depression and most probably committed suicide. There has been some controversy about whether he might have been murdered, but his contemporaries Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, as well as many historians, accepted that he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
How many bullets does it take to commit suicide?
In his case two; one to the head and one to the abdomen. There are many reasons why some people still question if it was really suicide. The general consensus is that it was.
Seems to have been popular in Southern California for a time.
I am specifically interested if suicides were a common event in the past, as they are now, and, if depression was a leading cause.
As you go back in history, the problem becomes one of records. If a farmer got depressed and ate poison or jumped off a cliff, only his family cared, and no one wrote it down. When a minor servant died, who would care to even enquire about the cause unless it looked like murder. Suicide was shameful and would have been covered up - burial in a churchyard was not allowed for suicides.
It reminds me of a quote from the physics textbook, States of Matter
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”
Not to mention UCLA
would I get a mod warning if I broached the topic of suicide by cop?
Of course, I’m referring to the historical figure of Hans Kohlhaus, who, in a fit of pique, set himself as the enemy of the state against impossible odds. The name and the story may be familiar: E. L. Doctorow used it for Ragtime.
Max Beerbohm’s ***Zuleika Dobson ***was a satire that mocked such romantic suicides.
I’ll have to check that out. I absolutely loath that trope in literature! (And FWIW am not a big fan IRL, either. Just in case that wasn’t clear.)
Part of the problem is that due to lack of documentation and shame a lot of suicides were probably never reported or were covered up. Many muslim countries have low suicide rates about 10x lower than the US, but how much of that is due to the fact that suicide is covered up? Either the suicidal person finds a way to kill themselves that makes it look like it wasn’t suicide or the coroner covers it up.
Pure speculation without any cites.
Do you know what the little brackets with numbers inside them are? Those are sources. In particular, GHO | By category | Suicide rate estimates, crude - Estimates by country.