Q & A: What Exactly Makes Someone Decide to Commit Suicide?

Q: What would it take to push [a] character into suicide? Would there necessarily be a final "straw that broke the camel's back," a precipitating event? Or would such a person be likely to ruminate on his life and eventually decide that killing himself is simply the next right thing to do? Is one of those scenarios more likely than the other?

My character is the eldest of seven children. His parents are immigrants from Germany, [so he has] a strong work ethic, a concern about fitting in with neighbors and also a concern that they be perceived as moral and honest. He isin South Carolina during Reconstruction, has (perhaps) served during the Civil War.Society has changed for him. He also feels, I think, that he's failed in his calling to the ministry.

I found this on Wikipedia, and I think it applies to my character:

Anomic suicide: Anomie is a state in which there is weak social regulation between the society's norms and the individual, most often brought on by dramatic changes in economic and/or social circumstances. This type of suicide happens when the social norms and laws governing the society do not correspond with the life goals of the individual. Since the individual does not identify with the norms of the society, suicide seems to be a way to escape them. Durkheim saw this as the explanation for Protestants committing suicide.

A:Durkheim lists 4 types of suicide. He views them as falling on two continuums, moral regulation and social integration.

I know you don't need all 4, but I think it's helpful to see the concept in context. I put some examples on the bottom chart in red.

Anomic suicide is when someone feels adrift because the world doesn't fit his ideas of how it should work. When there's a lot of social or economic change, the person in this situation likely believes the world should function according to the old rules and isn't adapting to the new ones.

It sounds like that fits your character. Some of the other types may as well.

Don't let the fact that Durkheim has all of these things going in different directions convince you that he couldn't have anomie and fatalism at the same time. It's possible, the regulation would just be in different areas of his life. (I know, I'm just making it more confusing! I'll use examples below to try to clarify.)

Why NOW?

There's always a reason the person decides they want to die NOW as opposed to last week or last month, so in that way there's always a precipitating cause. But it doesn't have to be necessarily an event (though that's common, and it may be a tiny event), it can just be the person is exhausted with feeling so bad and comes to the conclusion that they're never going to feel better, or the problem is never going to get better.

Nobody Notices

For some people the event is nobody reacting to the tiny hints that they're considering suicide, because it feels like nobody cares. There was a guy (this is a true story) who asked to take home some rope from work.He asked every single person he worked with, including people who had no authority to tell him whether he could or not. Nobody thought to ask why he wanted it. He hung himself that night with it.

What he really wanted, I think,was for somebody to care enough to ask why and then stop him. Otherwise why go to all that trouble of asking everyone? In retrospect, it can seem ridiculously obvious the person was going to kill themselves, but a little strange behavior beforehand doesn't usually get the attention the person believes it should. In other words, the suicidal person is so upset they think it will be obvious in such an innocuous question. (You can see how easy it would be to go, "I don't know, go ask ___." Or, "Sure, whatever. Just leave a note for the boss.")

How Religion Can Contribute

Religion is an interesting thing. It keeps a lot of people from committing suicide, but he has a lot of reasons to be suicidal if he feels he's failed his faith in some way.

Self-Condemnation

Some religious people commit suicide because they don't feel they can live up to "God's" expectations (in reality it's often the church or community they're in). They feel such guilt and self-condemnation that they just do themselves in.

Suicide as a Religious Act

Some religious people twist religion around until they figure out a way that the suicide serves their religion, like suicide bombers in radical Islam.

A Crisis of Faith

Some people have a crisis of faith.The person feels God has failed them (or they've failed God and He's turned his back on them), and they give up on God, want revenge on God, or just don't believe God is there, making their religion useless. Having a faith you've built your life and values on crumble beneath you is more than some people can handle. That will definitely create anomie, because all of the regulation is suddenly gone.

People can also have crises of faith if they see people they believed were good Christians (including themselves) doing very "unChristian things." For example, someone might have a crisis of faith if they believed killing was an unforgivable sin (in spite of the tenants of everyone being forgiven by faith, a lot of people still think—or feel—it's all about what you do or don't do) and they killed, or someone they loved had to kill to survive. The person can't reconcile a God who would condemn their friend (or them)for doing something he had to do.

Lots of examples that may have nothing to do with your story, but I hope they help make sense of the thought process that often happens.

Shame

The concern that others see them in a particular way could also be a big contributor. People kill themselves out of shame — this would be more fatalistic suicide — the person doesn't feel there's a way to escape the shame because of the rules of society.

People kill themselves to spare their families shame or cost, too. Or to hide something. They don't want people to know they've gone broke, or that they feel immoral, or whatever.

PTSD

People who have been to war also experience things that can make them suicidal: PTSD. Coming back and feeling like they've changed and nobody else has. Seeing the world as so much uglier than they thought. Seeing good people die. (Religious people can begin to question why God didn't save them.) Survivor guilt, which is guilt that you survived and the other person or people didn't. People will sometimes kill themselves as a result, almost to rectify the fact that they lived.

The psychological impact of the Civil War was also extremely high, because nobody had been inoculated against death and gore by video games, television, and movies. I've read that they had some trouble getting the soldiers to shoot each other because the idea of killing someone else was just so unfathomable to many of them.

The 3 "Stages" of Suicidal Thought

Something important about suicide. There are 3 (I'm going to call them stages, even though they're really not) stages everyone goes through in the thinking process, which is why they're what we assess if someone expresses suicidal ideation.

1. Thinking about killing yourself

This can be active (I want to hang myself) or passive (I wish someone had just shot me during the war). Most people don't go any farther than this because their family, faith, children, or whatever keep them from thinking beyond this. This is the biggest obstacle your character will go over; if he has a crisis of faith, for example, it will be what crumbles his reasons for not doing it.

2. Deciding how to kill yourself

People choose their methods with a disturbing amount of care. They think about what other people will see when they find the body, how messy it will be, how quickly it will happen, how much it will hurt, whether they can change their minds after they start (eg you can call for help after taking pills, you can't if you just blew your head off, to say it indelicately), and so on.

In most cases I doubt they really understand how their suicide will affect those left behind. The guy with the rope above, several of his coworkers started to develop PTSDbecause they felt so awful about not realizing why he was asking. I doubt that possibility ever occurred to him. People also romanticize suicide far too much.

There's no clean way to do it (even sitting in the car with the engine running so you can "quietly go to sleep" leaves an ugly mess), and finding the dead body of anyone, let alone someone you knew (and loved!) is incredibly traumatic. Survivor guilt (why am I alive and that person is dead, why didn't I stop them) can be awful.

Many people stop here. The "plan" becomes a "just in case I can't take it anymore" type of thing. An "out."

If they don't stop there, they begin making plans — buying the gun, hoarding pills, looking for a place they can get rope.Asking if they can take the rope home.Once they start to make the actual plans to get what they need, it's a very, very short jump to #3.

3. Choosing a time

Times are always in the near future, and they tend to be chosen with care, unless the person suddenly just can't take it anymore and executes a plan already in place, or does it impulsively (like someone who just runs the car off the road, or decides to play Russian roulette).

If someone does it impulsively, theyneed to be impulsivein other aspects of their life.

Deliberate people usually don't kill themselves impulsively.Deliberate people are incredibly careful about every detail.People will talk about someone killing themselves "out of the blue," but that's really a "once in a blue moon" type of thing. There are always signs of some sort. It's just whether people notice them. Anyways, back to the time. People pick something specific, usually. On the anniversary of _____. After the kids go off to camp on ________. After all the chores are done and nobody will come out to the barn for anything for a few hours.

People who are confronted by someone — "Are you thinking about killing yourself?" will either lie outright (rare) or will tell the flat-out truth and then usually make the person promise not to tell anyone. I genuinely believe that most people don't want to die, they want a way to escape what feels like an intolerable situation, and they don't know what else to do. So if someone offers them even a smidgen of hope, they'll leap at it.