W. Wynn Westcott

“ It is the spread of an unsound system of partial education, the tasting of the Pierian spring without drinking deeply, which poisons the mind; mere fragmentary, rudimentary instruction unballasted by the requisite amount of moral and religious teaching. The mere ability to read is, I think, liable to become a great curse unless most carefully used, for it is only too common to find that those who can only read, only read what they had much better have left unread ”

“ And this is a very fair example of many instances of voluntary death, but whether it forms a good public policy to call those sufferers insane is questionable: personally, I think that such persons are encouraged by the neglect to stigmatise them as criminals.
It is not every suicide from a dangerous height that is caused by imitation; there does undoubtedly exist a peculiar form of fascination, apt to arise from a sense of insecurity, such as occurs to a person standing on a cliff or a house top, and I am convinced that this fascination does cause many involuntary suicides. ”

“ Suicide, apart from lunacy, is the act of passion, or despair, and so far spares childhood, during which stage of life one is protected by others from care, and when the mind is not yet opened enough to feel the overwhelming tides of amatory, jealous, and other passionate feelings which the adult intellect has to struggle through, and perchance survive. It is very rare, also, for insanity to occur in a child before puberty, unless congenital, as imbecility. ”

“ When the tendency is the result of alcoholism, we are met by this difficulty; restraint is needed, and yet no one has the power to enforce restraint; the physician succeeds well enough in relieving the alcoholic delirium and coincident risk of suicide, perhaps time after time; but is powerless to prevent a succeeding attack. Unless a sufferer can be induced to volunteer his entry into a retreat, there are no means of saving him from himself. So long as a man is sensible when sober, be it only for an hour a day, he is beyond the reach of compulsory cure. ”

“ Suicide is not in law any proof of the existence of insanity, yet no sooner is the suicide quite dead, than almost every one cries out that he was insane. Again, an attempt at suicide is a misdemeanour punishable by imprisonment, yet a person caught in the act and taken before the magistrates is generally dismissed from custody, not because of insanity, certainly not, because if that were the plea, he would be sent to an asylum, and not set free; but let the culprit presently die from a cause dependent on the suicidal injury, and the verdict will be that he was insane. ”

“ In concluding the consideration of causation, I remark that Morselli and others have said, that in the ancient world political fanaticism had its era for causing men to end their lives; in the Middle Ages religious fanaticism held its sway as a cause of suicide; and I should add that in modern times it is the high pressure at which we live, the difficulty of obtaining a livelihood, and the forced education of the young, which fills our asylums and swells our voluntary death-rate. ”

“ Under public causes he classes suicide to save public honour of a government, to avenge the disgrace of one’s country, to defend the honour of others, and suicide in despair of the state of public affairs. ”

“ No more powerful individual deterrent has been suggested than the firm unwavering mental conviction (which has always been propounded by the Christian church) that a self-inflicted death is an evil to which nothing on this side of the grave can compare,4 and that to rush unsolicited into the presence of the Creator is an inexpiable crime.
As a general preventive, the force of a well directed system of education, acting on the probably unlimited capacity for improvement inherent in the human race, is the lever to which modern civilization is disposed to trust. ”

“ I believe that if a calculation could be made of the proximate causes of suicide in England, the most common causes would be found to be misery, despair of success in life, and remorse for crimes, misdemeanours and follies. ”

“ No one doubts that animals may die from some voluntary action of their own; for example, a dog may die of eating poisoned food, or a horse may die from a blow caused by jumping over a space with insufficient caution and observation, or a monkey may cut his throat by imitating a man shaving; similar deaths would not be called suicide in man. The tendency of the present day is rather in favour of granting to the lower beings of creation a larger share of intelligence than used to be assigned to them. ”

“ THE PREVENTION OF SUICIDE, AND THE TREATMENT OF THE SUICIDAL TENDENCY IN THE INSANE.
It is a terrible thought that our much boasted civilisation and modern educational advantages bring with them a suicide rate which nothing so far has been found to check.
The struggle for existence, at our present high pressure, ends in the survival of the strongest and most able; the weaker in body, and the feebler in mind, get pushed aside and pass away before their due time by disease and self-destruction. ”

“ In the United States suicide has never been a crime against statute law, nor have there ever been any burial barbarities in cases of suicide; but any one accessory to a suicide is guilty of murder as a principal. ”

“ But it became the constant practice of Coroner’s juries to find that persons who had been proved to have destroyed themselves were suffering from “temporary insanity”: they thus avoided a verdict of felo-de-se; hence arose the necessity of an understanding whether or not “Suicide whilst insane” did or did not vitiate a policy. In equity, of course, such a death should not do so, because the death occurs without the voluntary determination of a healthy mind, and no one can contract himself out of the possibility of some day losing his reason. ”

“ Cities more than villages contain the two extreme states of riches and poverty, both of which tend to a voluntary death: in cities the struggle for existence is much sharper than it is amid the scattered population of villages, and together with this point is the collateral one of mental strain and excitement existing when not required for merely procuring a living. ”

“ There is no lunacy present where the sense of weariness of life is in exact relation to existing circumstances; where obvious moral causes exist which satisfactorily account for the deed; when the resolve has been fixed deliberately, and might have been abandoned had the circumstances become altered; and in which we discover, after honest and impartial search, no other sign or symptom of mental derangement. When a man prefers dissolution to a miserable or contemptible life, or one full of mental and physical ills, Morality and Religion must charge him with the deed ”

“ The difficulty might never have arisen, but for this unfortunate straining of the word insanity to cover all cases of suicide.
On the Continent, in many States, this injudicious mode of regarding suicides does not exist; when madmen kill themselves, their madness is registered; and when persons whom no one has ever noticed to be unable to manage their affairs, and whose mental state has not been disturbed, until they have preferred death to life, on account of some loss or annoyance, their voluntary deaths are registered as such. ”

“ I have already alluded to the debated question as to the tendencies of religion and education.
Statistics seem to point so clearly to development of the mind and mental tension as a cause of voluntary death, that it is probably of no use to look to education as a cure for the suicidal tendency in individuals.
The cultivation of a religious conviction of the sanctity of life, and the sin of a self-inflicted death is a more certain hindrance to suicide. ”

“ I cannot refrain from saying that both law and custom with respect to Suicide are in a very unsatisfactory and anomalous state. On the one hand, self-murder is ranked by the law as a felony, one of the worst of crimes;─on the other hand, hardly one suicide a year is called a felon. ”

“ And among the modes of exhibiting its effects, it must not be forgotten that epilepsy is in some cases apt to show itself, not in a physical spasm but in a nerve storm, burst of passion, and what not: compare the opinion of Trousseau, in “L’Union Medicale,” 1861; he says:
“It may even safely be asserted that if a man who has presented no previous mental disturbance, or any sign of lunacy or furor, is not under the influence of alcohol, or any other drug, commit murder or suicide, he is epileptic, and has suffered a complete paroxysm, or has had epileptic vertigo.” ”

“ The morals of a state cannot fail to have a deep and lasting effect on the amount of crime and madness, and hence on the suicide rate. But it is by no means easy to prove by statistics the actual rate of influence; the social customs and modes of life are so very various, and the different laws of each state with regard to moral sins are so different. At the same time it cannot be denied that several important nations, among whom the virtues of social family life are specially studied, have a very high suicide rate, such as the Germans and Danes. ”

“ In every age of the world, and in the history of almost every country, we find instances more or less numerous of men and women who, preferring the dim uncertainty of the future to the painful realities of the present, have sought relief from all their troubles by suddenly terminating their own existence. ”

“ In general, as a result of the sum of religious statistics, too numerous and voluminous for quotation here, we may generalise and say that Catholics incline to suicide through madness, following their vices, while Protestants fly to suicide as relief from domestic troubles, monetary anxieties, remorse for wasted opportunities, and regret for the absence of hoped for results; they are also more liable than Catholics to suicide following religious mania.
Extravagances in religion are sometimes a symptom of madness; at others, extravagances in religion lead to madness in enfeebled minds. ”

“ But it seems probable that in the minds of many suicides there has been, below any religious faith, or philosophical dogma, the deeply-rooted conviction that death was a sleep and permanent rest, an eternal oblivion in the grave, and they consequently came to regard it as the grand solatium for present heart-breaking grief of mind, or intolerable pain of body. ”

“ Bertillon remarks that widows are much less anxious than widowers to marry again; that many widows become so to their peace and happiness, and the isolation and bereavement of widowhood are usually overbalanced by woman’s noblest virtue and care, maternal love; where there is no such outcome needed, suicide fastens its fangs on the mind. ”

“ By English law Suicide is of the Felony of Murder, inasmuch as it is the murder of one of the subjects of the sovereign: it is a murder committed by a man on himself. There is authority for saying that there is no such offence as self-manslaughter. ”

“ When we reflect, with satisfaction perhaps, that in England crime has been steadily decreasing, the fact that Suicide has been as steadily on the increase in Great Britain, and in almost every country in Europe, while it awakens our sympathy on behalf of the unhappy victims,vi should stimulate our exertions towards promoting the diminution of this moral plague spot. ”

“ A very long interval occurs here, during which period I cannot discover any Notable Suicides: on passing to the next series a great change will be noticed as to causation, the days of suicide for honour are passed: Misery has become the mainspring. ”

“ Closely connected with mental and bodily disorders as a cause of suicide is sleeplessness, apart from organic disease. There is, I suppose, nothing more trying to the sensations, and nothing more exhausting to the nervous system, than this symptom. Its tendency to become habitual, and to become more and more complete, are its harassing qualities. I have held inquests on cases distinctly referable to the misery caused by want of sleep. ”

“ If it be true that a scorpion will sting itself to death when irritated beyond measure, I should be inclined to think that it perishes in its efforts to sting its enemies; or if not, I should imagine that the action resembles that of a man tearing his hair from anger, when he cannot injure his opponent. ”

“ With regard to the business of one’s life, it has been noticed that professions and trades, which by habits, physical and mental, bring women near to men, often tend to raise in an extraordinary degree the inclination of women to kill themselves.
It is a matter of the greatest difficulty to procure statistics sufficiently reliable of the numbers of each profession and trade, to couple with the numbers of known suicides of each trade and profession, for the purpose of obtaining a “professional suicide rate.” ”

“ Our English Judges have, unfortunately, not been unanimous in their decisions respecting the forfeiture of insurances by voluntary death; and the assurance companies have further complicated the matter by the insertion of peculiar clauses in their policies, and by using alternative phrases, meaning suicide, which the law courts have held to infer different notions.
It has always been the custom to insert in policies of life assurance the proviso that the death of the assured by suicide should render the policy void. ”

“ The changes of rate produced by Race mingling can be studied, not only in countries where the process has been going on for centuries, but also in respect to recent movements of men. When Europeans emigrate, they are found to carry with them to their new home their peculiarities in regard to Suicide: the several races of Germans have a high rate at home, and on examination of the records of a country peopled by emigration, of New York, for instance, we find that the Germans there kill themselves more often than the Anglo-Saxon element, which has in its home a low suicide rate. ”