Like in all epidemics, suicide is contagious.
Besides a real imitation, a suicide stimulates a kind of admiration for the person who commits it, as if the suicide were a hero. According to our usual opinion it is as if collective unconscious, aware of the big danger implied in overpopulation, should perceive the act of the suicide which simply remove a figure from the calculation of human population like a religious or heroic deed. It might have been this what induced tens of people to shout to an aspiring suicide on the top of a building of Piazza Castello in Turin:” throw down, throw down, what you are waiting,don’t make us waste our time”. The shouts went on for the whole afternoon, becoming even rhythmical like the ones of fans in a stadium. Something quite different from the sympathy for the single drama demanded by psychiotrists.Other times instigation to suicide may be found on Internet, this seems the only explanation of some unjustified suicides of adolescents who would have carried some role-playing games till the extreme point of committing suicide. Even there should have been two surfers from L’Aquila who, with some messages on line, would have induced a twenty-yeat-old youth from the province of Venice to commit suicide. Already depressed, the boy wouldn’t have resisted the continuos instigations to suicide:”connect, with a rubber pipe, the driver compartment of your car to the exhaust pipe, then start the engine; it’s easy, it’s easy”. Signed the Angel of Death.It isn’t our task to ascertain whether it is or not the usual urban legend, on the contrary, if it is like that, it would be even more evident that suicide has entered the collective imagination as a phenomenon that is highly widespread among young peolpe as well[1].
Another episode shows in an even more specific way as suicide is a social problem which cannot be dismissed with trivial words like youth unrest. I refer to the cassette of leave and explanations, which was left to his parents by a sixteen-year-old boy from Montecatini Terme two days before shooting in his face in front of the schoolmates:”Dear patents I’m carrying out all this to see what there is after death and who is right. In this world there are few hopes for us young people and I hope that, with this act, the world realizes we also exist with our problems.I apologize with you, you have been very loving, like my teachers.This is a choice of my own. My last will is I would be cremated”.
The experts of the case didn’t ask that nothing should be said about the event, but his schoolmates and the suicide’s teachers did [2].
This is strange all the more since Lorenzo had wanted to give his act a precise meaning and spread it around. It is as any time somebody gets near, I can’t say the comprehension of the phenomenon, but, at least, reliable evidences such as may be the words of a boy who, quite conscious, has decided to commit suicide, people, even the closest ones, want only to close the case in a hurry and silently[3],[4]
In support of our thesis the clearness and coherence with which the boy carried out his act are fundamental because they take us very near the reason of so many suicides:”Parents aren’t guilty, school isn’t guilty, nobody is guilty”.
A television that broadcasts anything, exalting all kinds of negative heroes, maybe serial killers, rapists, idiot entertainers and billionaires, in the event of broadcasting the boy’s will, backed out: all the experts had furiously opposed the opportunity of letting the suicide speak by justifying the decision with the risk of turning young suicides into negative heroes.
But the program was broacasted all the same, everybody spoke, included his paents, but Lorenzo[5], the author of the event. Long time has passed away from that program and that silence so violently imposed to the suicide, but suicides, above all youth ones, are increasing dramatically.
In ordert to imitate a suicide neighbour, a thirteen-yeat-old child in Bitonto, Bari, hangs himself. Imitation may even concern an unreal event.
Luca, fourteen years old, hanged himself while trying to imitate, as a joke, a movie starring Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia”Two ringos in Texas” a parody of western films by Sergio Leone, shot thirty-three years before with a scene where there is a sham hanging. Beyond its tragic fortuitousness, the event testifies” the culture of suicide” because in the past a boy would never have thought of imitating a scene of a suicide.
After the suicide of one of his soldiers, a twenty-five-year-old “carabiniere” from Cefalù, Sicily, shoots in his mouth. As they had found, still living, the answers Lorenzo intended to look for after his death, two adolescents from Cagliari, certain they should have been reincarnated soon, committed suicide by shooting themselves one after the other in the drawing room of one of the two guys.
In Madrid a boy spends sleepless nights writing a novel ending with the suicide of the protagonist. He delivers the manuscript to the jury of a literary prize, then he runs towards the French Bridge, the one behind the Royal Palace in Madrid which steps over the Manzanarre and a main road of fast flowing fraffic. A glance downwards, then the youth throws himself down, after greeting two policemen saying to them” My name is J.M.M.”. The boy, one of the best students at the Faculty of Journalism, survived miraculously.
As far as I know, nobody has thought, till now, of making an aspiring suicide speak to get an explanation of the phenomenon. We complain when a suicide doesn’t leave any note of leave or explanation, but then, as it was in the case of lorenzo, the explanations given by the same suicide are rejected and nobody tries to take advantage of an extraordinary case like the one of a survived aspiring suicide to understand something more.Even serial killers, before the capital punishment, have been studied for long to try to understand the reasons of their behaviour.
[1]Young people are, mostly, to make use of the cultural instrument of the urban legend.
[2] We think the only lesson this event can leave us may be an absolute and sincere silence for those who are suffering and for those who are reflecting upon what happened. As for us we have hard words and full of anger for all those people who speculate on our feelings and made a boy, just for one day,a hero many people will, shortly, forget. A boy who isn’t with us any longer won’t be remembered for what he was but for his foolish act that made us famous and national for one day.
[3] The headmaster of the Institute, where the event took place, in front of the journalists who bombard her with a lot of questions, she answers the only possible one why?, hissing her words:”You have already divulged the piece of news, you aren’t psychologists and it isn’t your business to try to understand what are the resons that induced the student to commit suicide and asserts:”this morning the boy’s father begged to keep silent about this terrible tragedy”.
[4] “He was a solitary type, without friends,without a group, we didn’t understand he was alone, he suffered from his loneliness-Lorenzo’s schoolmates tell the reporter-he was an introvert, he has never opened his heart to any of us,or else we should know it”. A giant with clay feet”-the headmaster of another institute defines one suicide students of hers.
[5]How culturally far is the movie “Rashomon” by Akira Kurosawa: in the Japan of Samurai during a trial for rape and homicide, first the homicide, then the raped woman speak and at a certain point, surprisingly, the soul of the dead person is called to express his opinion, through an exorcism.
Translated from Il Virus Intelligente by Enrica Narducci
To be continued in:
7°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Seventh part)
8°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Eighth part)
9°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Nineth part)
10°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Tenth part)
11°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Eleventh part)
12°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Twelfth Part)
13°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Thirteenth Part)
14°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Fourteenth Part)
15°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre XV part)
16°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Sixteenth part)
17°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre XVII part)
18°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre XVIII part)
19°) (Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre XIX part)
20°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre XX part)
21°) Suicides (Le Malde Vivre Twenty-first part)
See also:
1°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre First Part)
2°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Second Part)
3°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Third Part)
4°) Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Fourth Part)
5°) Suicides (Le Mal de vivre Fifth Part)
Ferdinando Gargiulo offers you a new perspective on why new viral epidemics, assaults, infanticides, suicide epidemics and even environmental catastrophes. Always engaged in his research decides to create a blog to offer his readers content of high value.