How have suicide rates changed throughout history?

[Fireclown]

Are more (or less) people killing themselves than did 1000s of years ago? Or for that matter, compared to centuries or decades ago?

[DrDeth]

Well, how do we know? Could it have been fairly common for a death to be classified as “accidental” rather than suicide in order to spare the family? I don’t think we have any *solid and reliable *stats that far back. But it is an interesting question.

[Chez_Guevara]

I’ve got to agree with the Dr.

Here is a review of a book entitled Suicide in the Middle Ages. Volume I: The Violent against Themselves by Alexander Murray. The piece is notable for its references to Murray’s self-acknowledged difficulties in gathering reliable data. The reviewer himself observes that:

The historian of medieval suicide faces a far more difficult task than his colleagues charting developments in more recent periods. The most obvious problem lies in the acute dearth or absence of most of the sorts of material (censuses, registers of deaths or burials, bills of mortality, newspaper reports, records of inquests and criminal proceedings) which survive in increasing quantities from the centuries after 1500.

Furthermore:

Medieval accounts of suicide describe it as a private deed which its perpetrators did their best to conceal. It was often difficult to prove, and commonly the subject of discreet allusion by means of euphemism, metaphor and circumlocution. Suicide was widely felt to be too terrible to talk about, and though the word suicida was coined as early as c. 1178, it was not accepted into general use, and seems to have vanished until well after the end of the Middle Ages. Chronicles, largely devoted to the deeds of the great and famous, were extremely reticent on this subject. In what Murray calls ‘whispers’ about the deaths of the high born, self-killing was mentioned obliquely, or given as one of two or three alternative explanations of a particular d eath. Only the suicides of men such as ‘the fallen favourite or functionary’ who had risen above his station and then encountered sudden disgrace, were likely to be reported unambiguously in the ‘ordinary, mainstream historical chronicle’

and finally:

This volume ends with some ‘quasi-statistical’ (p. 352) analysis of cases in Murray’s register of suicides. He readily recognises (p. 350) that so far as the Middle Ages are concerned the difficulties facing statisticians are usually ‘so big as almost to block the way to statistics at all’. Yet his conviction of their importance, a ‘version of the faith of Durkheim’ makes him try to clear the path. Several of the questions he poses can only be answered from English judicial sources, and some of them f or only a few years of the long period (1000-1500) subject to scrutiny. The penultimate chapter demonstrates the impossibility of supplying the ‘Absolute Numbers’ to which its title refers. The Essex eyre roll of 1285 points to an annual suicide rate of 0.88 per 100,000 since 1272. That figure is based on the assumption that the Eyre had picked up all suicides occurring over the previous thirteen years. Murray concedes that the assumption is an unrealistic one.

So Mr. Murray devotes a considerable period of his time to researching this subject, the first part of a planned trilogy in fact, and his own conclusions warn of the unreliability of the source data.

For this time period at least, the information just isn’t there.

[NoCoolUserName]

But you gotta love phrases like “acute dearth” and “discreet allusion by means of euphemism, metaphor and circumlocution.”

I’d even be interested to find out if there are reliable statistics from 100 years ago.

[Rube_E.Tewesday]

AKAIK, it’s difficult to get accurate suicide rates even today. It’s a safe bet that a lot of fatal single car accidents are actually suicides, for example, but who can say how many? For past eras where record keeping was spotty, where many records that were kept have been lost, and where suicide had a huge social stigma plus serious legal consequences, you’re going to have a huge GIGO factor, as **Chez Guevara ** has so ably explained.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Perhaps we shouldn’t limit ourselves to Western Europe. The Chinese have kept detailed records (births, deaths, taxes and of course astronomy) going back many hundreds of years; I wonder if they had a suicide taboo that would obscure its true extent? For that matter, the Japanese bushido culture virtually demanded suicide in some circumstances. I wonder how Japanese suicide rates in, say, 1507, would compare to those in 2007 (climbing, unfortunately, from what I’ve read)?

[Maastricht]

I remember reading in Desmond Morris’s book, The Naked Ape, that the suicide rate among civilians goes down in times of war.