The epidemic of suicides is going on unceasingly and has entered the statistics of death causes as it were one of the many ( cancers, car accidents, homicides etc…) without considering the phenomenon as an unusual one.

The numerical increase is going on unceasingly so that, as we read in the previous post, the number of suicides exceeded the one of the dead in wars and violent crimes in 2002.[1]

On the contrary, as to the characteristics of the epidemic, already pointed out some time ago http://www.ilvirusintelligente.com/20-male-vivere-ed-suicidio/, there are no big differences rather only an exacerbation of some of the most dramatic categories.

The resolute suicide intent is evident in the case of the 15 year old boy who committed suicide in Russia in September 2018 by cutting his head with a chainsaw. The case is included also in the category of the quite superficial explanations since the adolescent should have committed suicide because he had lost a videogame. Always in the same category we find the case of a man who, while going along Sora-Frosinone highway, beheaded himself in a really ingenious-perverse way. The man fastened a steel wire to a road sign pole,wound it around his neck and then made it pass across the window of his car. When tha car started at full speed he was immediately beheaded. The body and the head of the man were found in side the car and the scene was appalling. The resolute suicide intent in the American culture induced a 19 year old girl to engage, on the web, a 23 year old killer and she herself gave him a pistol with which the boy fired the back of her neck. Just before the event the girl had taken a potentially lethal dose of heroine.

Another episode might be included in the category of the resolute suicide intent even if a profiling might give a most articulated explanation. A man aged 44 from Rome flies to Bangkok, enters a popular shopping centre and commits suicide jumping out of the sixth floor.

The category of suicides taking place in the same family is always well represented. A girl aged 18 commits suicide jumping out of a bridge fifteen years after her mother; actually the latter had already tried to take with her her daughter who was 3 years old at the time, she wasn’t successful but fifteen years later her daughter decided it was right to join her. Certainly the suicide of the two twins aged 55 who lived in Gallicano in Latium and jumped out of an A24 overpass in May 2018 can be included in the category of suicides taking place in the same family.

There is also the category of pact suicides or anyway of those suicides among people linked by friendship or otherwise not explicable. After Miss Great Britain’s suicide and her fiancè’s  5 days after the girl’s funeral, in the following 20 days two brothers, childhood friends of the couple, committed suicide. The datum concerning the lowering of the age of children’s suicides remains un altered, among them we can rather point out the topicality of the present-day motivations: bullying for a 10 year old child in England in Worchester, an attempt luckily failed. Something suitable to the so called “pain TV” is the case of the 10 year old child who commits suicide in Mexico on the ” dias of Reyes”[2] to please her mother who used to say to her ” I’d like you were never born”. Bullying, coming out, children’s suicides and pact suicides mingle in an icreasing of perversion and drama in the suicide of Maddisen and Sophia, two eleven year old girls from North Dakota ( Devils Lake) who were in love with each other and for this bullied by their schoolmates. Even no using a mobile phone was one among the causes of children’s suicides: Even aged nine, Bronx New York. Instagram , with its ” horrble” and “distressing” images, should have been, according to her mother, the cause that should have induced an eleven year old child to commit suicide at Bradford in England; the fact that before her suicide, jumping out of a bridge, young Ursula had made self-inflicted injuries, seems not to have troubled her mother so much and the latter, in our opinion, found easier to charge Instagram for such an extreme gesture.

Unchanged is the category of suicide mothers who, by involving their children in their suicide, remove their own genes that, otherwise, might survive in their children. A new mother jumped with her four month twins into the river Tiber, in Rome.

While trying to stop her daughter who is going to jump out of the twelfth floor together with her granddaughter, the mother/grandmother is dragged down and this way three generations are eliminated. Always to eliminate her children before committing suicide together with them a woman aged forty-eight from Valle d’Osta makes use of a lethal injection availing herself of her experience as a nurse.

Suicides preceded by the homicide of their children are carried out also by men, so, at Francavilla, before committing suicide jumping out of an overpass, a father throws down his twelve year old daughter.

When life is perceived like ill, it isn’t accidental that a hospital is chosen where to commit suicide. The last case took place at the hospital of San Giovanni di Dio and Ruggi d’Aragona in Salerno. Suicide is so usual that may be used to cover up a homicide and particularly in the cases of suicides committed by people who, at the time, were together with other persons: it’s always suspected that actually it might have been a homicide. An example is the suicide of the 18 year old girl from  Naples who fell from the sixth floor of the building where she lived. At first it was thought it had been a suicide, but the CPS reopened the case and three of her friends were inquired.

In the book The Intelligent Virus we have explained the epidemic of suicides with a mechanism at genetic feedback or negative retroaction  in turn linked to the genetic origin  of depression and the tendency to suicide: as population grows, the number of people genetically predisposed to depression and suicide increases.Certainly explaining a phenomenon so widespread and dramatic as the one of the epidemic of suicides with a mechanism borrowed from the animal world is a very hard choice and as it is, at present it’s rejected, maybe, it is too distressing. As far as we know no other explanation has been given to the phenomenon, even as a simple hypothesis, or better the epidemic of suicides isn’t considered in its epidemic aspect but from time to time every episode is explained in a different way.

[1] In 2002 out of 57 milion dead, only 172 thousand people died in war and 569 thousand died of a  violent crime, in all 741 thousand victims; 873 thousand people committed suicide. ( source: The World Health Report 2004, World Health Organization,124. Data dating back on 10^th December 2010 https://www.who.int/whr/2004/en/report04 en,pdf

[2] Feast of the Three Kids Day, a popular Mexican feast that is celebrated on 6^th January during which families exchange presents.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci