Abstract
We explore the ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments about suicide; we compare other causes of death and the extraordinary responses to suicide; the frustration of unravelling the causes of suicide; the taboos and stigmas of suicide as shown by the medical examiners ’ verdicts in the Twin Towers disaster of 9/11.
Suicide. A sideways word. A word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.
—Lauren Oliver [American novelist, author of Before I Fall (Oliver 2010)]
Taboos, though unadmitted, are potent. What is it that people fear? What they don’t understand. The civilised man is not a whit different from the savage in this respect. The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
—Henry Miller [American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1970)]
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Notes
- 1.
Correct grammar indicates that a person who takes their life is a ‘suicide’. To distinguish the verb from the noun, we have used ‘suicider ’ rather than ‘a suicide’ for such a person.
- 2.
Many life insurance policies were void if the insured suicided or suicided within one year of taking out a policy. Insurance ‘detectives’ like Dublin and Bunzel would have been the most painstaking of all death investigators .
- 3.
Judges 16:30 for Samson; 1 Samuel 31:4 for Saul; Matthew 27:5 for Judas.
- 4.
A strong opioid used for pain .
- 5.
In the USA, medical examiners are often trained forensic pathologists. They list cause of death into five categories: natural, accident, homicide, suicide and undetermined.
- 6.
On 14 May 2019, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Queensland had identified 31 genes as at-risk factors in depression .
- 7.
In the USA, for example, suicide rates have increased in almost every state between 1999 and 2016, as reported in Vital Signs, 7 June 2018.
- 8.
Hobart Mercury, 16 May 2019.
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Tatz, C., Tatz, S. (2019). The Sound of Suicide. In: The Sealed Box of Suicide. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28159-5_2
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