Spoiler warning: If you have not seen Star Wars Episode III Attack of the Clones, I don’t recommend reading this, as it is the inspiration for my query.
In Star Wars Episode III, Padame is in perfect physical health, but she dies from simply losing the will to live, and no other cause whatsoever.
Is it truly possible for one to will oneself to die, with no other form of suicidal action or physical illness? Have there been any documented cases of such?
I really doubt it, or my great grandmother would have been dead at 99, not still “living” at 102.
I am not a doctor, but I have heard of people training themselves to be able to alter their heart rate at will. I don’t know if that’s BS or not, but the extreme case of this would be reducing or increasing heart rate until death.
Padme is an alien with an alien’s physiology. Nothing we can say about humans will affect that.
And while heart rate can be controlled to a certain extent, I flatly don’t believe that even adepts can stop the heart entirely and override the autonomic nervous system to keep it from restarting. This only happen in Star Wars and similar comic-book-style fantasies.
Depends on whether you want to call depression “willing oneself to die.” We certainly see enough long-time couples where one person dies and the other dies within a few months.
Or as my father said about his parents, who lived very long lives: “They aren’t sitting around waiting to die – they’re waiting for the other one to die.”
Jainism has a practice of willing one’s own death known as Santhara or Sallenkhana, but it’s not completely without any physical component; in addition to mental and spiritual preparation, the Jain stops drinking and eating.
This is well-known and documented in many Indian spiritual practices. If you read up on them, you’ll find many accounts of famous yogis such as Paramahamsa Yogananda and Nityananda telling their disciples beforehand when they were going to cast off their bodies. Here is one account from a website about Nityananda:
Not too long after my grandmother died, my grandfather stopped eating or drinking. My father would visit him and try to get him to eat something or drink something, but pretty much he just wasn’t interested. Needless to say, it was fatal. I think they died 3 months apart.
Sorry, but I don’t believe parables, no matter what religion they’re from. This is not documentation, but narrative.
I was going to relate a similar story. My wife’s aunt died the same way. She just stopped eating anything. I’d imagine without a strong will to die it’d be pretty hard to not eat the food that’s put in front of you when you’re starving.
… so diagnoses the robot doctor! Oh the irony. I took this as a very weak plot patch. A Jedi had visions that Something Bad was going to happen in childbirth, and seeing as we haven’t set Padme up with any particular health problems we have to shoehorn in something quasi-supernatural. Apparently in certain highly advanced space civilizations pregnant women don’t see the ob/gyn, even to discover twins through the highly advanced technology known to the Wise Ones as “ultrasound.”
Apparently one also receives spiritual powers genetically. On the whole I wouldn’t draw too much medical insight from Lucas.
All of these anecdotes seem to describe someone who lost the will to live, and because of losing the will to live ceased to eat and/or drink, and subsequently died as a result of not eating or drinking. The OP was questioning if someone could die simply due to the loss of will to live itself, rather than dying from actions taken or not taken as a result of lacking will to live. In Episode III, Padme clearly wasn’t dying from thirst or dehydration; she was simply dying for no apparant reason other than lacking the will to live. AFAIK, in the real world, you can’t simply die from not wanting to live; your lack of a will to live has to cause you to do something else that makes you die, like not eating.
The funniest part of that movie was that robot’s lines:
“She has lost the will to live. We must operate immediately…”
What, are there “will to live” donors? You can just throw a new one in a hook it up? 
No, silly! There would be incompatibility/rejection problems.
Obviously, someone had found her “will to live,” posibly in the parking lot, and the doctor was simply going to go in and put it back. 
Midichlorians.
The way this passage is written is certainly narrative, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Not that I expect you or anyone to believe it just because a stranger on the internet said it. Naturally, some level of doubt is in order.
All I can say in my defense is that the event is said to have been witnessed by many people, and was widely reported in India at the time. No, I don’t have a cite.
Perhaps more reliable may be Paramahamsa Yogananda’s passing in 1952 near Los Angeles. He had announced his intention to leave his body after a banquet honoring an Indian ambassador, and did so after giving a speech, with many witnesses.
This notarized letter, which suggests that something unusual had happened, was written by Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetary director Mr. Harry T. Rowe:
We could argue whether that is relevant to the topic, but it does suggest that something about his death differed significantly from the norm.
Regardless, due to the nature of these stories and the purely scientific mentality of the bulk of the members of this board, I wouldn’t necessarily expect anyone to believe them without further “proof”, but I wonder what kind of “documentation” you could get that would satify your demands.
(p.s. in response to your statement that you wouldn’t believe such stories “no matter what religion they’re from”: neither of these people represented a particular religion. Just saying. )
I practically felt violated when I found that one could test positive for Jedi like it was fucking TB.
The obvious one that comes to mind is to have someone thoroughly checked out by a team of independent doctors ahead of time, and then then “will” oneself to death, with an autopsy later to determine that no poisons had been smuggled in.
This would be of dubious ethicality and hardly likely to take place, but it would constitute better documentation than the reports of “devotees.” (You may not consider this a religious parable, but for me any differences are smaller than are measurable.) I cannot trust a devotee either to interpret an event objectively or report it objectively later.
There have been numerous reports of perfectly preserved bodies, with equally numerous explanations. Without further study there is simply no way to evaluate them meaningfully.
I will point out, however, that the only function a notary has is to guarantee that the person signing a document is indeed who he or she claims to be. No claim of truth to the document itself is implied in any fashion. The use of “notarized letter” has historically been a sign of at best slipshod understanding of the meaning of proof and at worst outright fraud.
I have read that Native Australians wil lie down and die if they feel or are told they are hexed, and revive if the hex is removed. This holds true in several othe primitave cultures.