When the extended suicide of men involves their children the “cause” is very often the separation from their wife. A person, particularly selfish and devoid of moral sense and therefore not very prone to depression, can easily survive being left by his wife only by killing her or his children as a punishment without committing suicide, so the true cause of an extended suicide isn’t abandonment but a latent depression.
According to Francesco Bruno, a criminologist, depression and separation, with the consequent contending for children, are the causes of many extended suicides committed by man. Neither an imminent new marriage can avoid this tragedy, or better the concern about the expenses for the ceremony is considered a cause for the umpteenth episode.
Lacking in the partner, man commits an extended suicide on mother, a hadicapped sister, a brother. If there are no relatives a collegue or an eighty-one -year-old landlady will do.
After all, even as far as extended suicide in Italy is concerned, we are still good artisans, deeply attached to family. Nothing to do with the slaughters carried out by aspiring suicides all over the world.
One of these was carried out, in a church, by a forty-nine-year-old Gerrman lady during Christmas night mass, the woman exploded two hand granades she carried fastened to her belt and besides herself she killed two persons while thirteen more were seriously wounded.
Then we discovered the lady was married but separated one year before and her husband had taken away their only daughter of nine years of age. The German lady had been for long time under psychiatric treatment for depression.
After all the only constant and demonstrated factor of suicides ( extended) is once again depression.
Other cases of extended suicides concern the category of juvenile aggressiveness because, before himself, the suicide eliminates how many persons he can.The perpetrator is often a student, the tragedy takes place at school, the victims, besides the suicide, are his teachers and classmates. The most famous episodes happened at Denver(Colorado), 15 dead people, and at Erfurt (Thuringia-Germany), 18 of them.
In the present epidemic of suicides there are two particular aspects that, in one case, seem to confirm, in the other, apparently, deny the importance of depression in the origin of the phenomenon.
Multiple suicides in the same family are in favour of depression, against suicide pacts among people who aren’t akin.
It’s sensational the case of two sisters, one of twenty-three years of age and the other of forty-three who committed suicide one after the other with a four hours’ interval.
The younger starts and hangs herself in a little guesthouse in Rome. An exemplary student, with a university scholarship, and on the day before her suicide she had just started a job with CNR.
Something peculiar may be her wild passion for Nirvana, a Rock band whose leader Kurt Cobain committed suicide as well. On the day after the older sister imitates the self-destructive gesture but with the exhaust gas of her car.
Two young brothers from Spoleto commit suicide one after the other with one year’s interval. The second suicide is carried out in prison, where the young man is imprisoned for drug.
Being worried about a bad fall of his wife in the “pizzeria”, where they both work, a fifty-two-year-old man decides to close the spot. After few months he soffocates his wife and jumps into a void:” I was forced to do so”, leaves a note by the woman’s corpse. We are told – is it a chance? – that one of his brothers had committed suicide many years before.
The most disturbing case concerns three multiple suicides in the same family. It’s the sad story of Chiara, a nineteen-year-old girl with mental problems. She would see ghosts everywhere, was haunted by disturbing thoughts, so she decided to die and chose the same well where first her mother and later her grandfather had committed suicide. Mother had committed suicide after her husband had left her, her grandfather after his daughter’s death. Her relatives had never told the girl about the story of the well and an aunt of hers would hide the key of the manhole placed on the opening. After spying on her aunt’s movements, the girl took the key, opened the padlock and threw herself into the seven-eight-metre- deep well.
Above all young couples [1] commit a joined suicide and the written or sometimes even filmed farewell card has always the same subject: a release from any responsability for their respective parents. Reason of the gesture: life isn’t worth being lived.
A joined-deferred suicide is mistaken with a suicide for loss: a twenty-two-year-old Scottish girl hangs herself on the balcony of her house with the leash of her dog at Cortina, one month before her wedding. One week later her fiancè, an Italian boy of twenty-three years of age, ” in despair for the loss”, goes out for a walk with his dog and hangs himself, always with the same leash, from the branch of a fir.
When a joined suicide isn’t committed by two partners, but, rarely, by a couple of friends, in Italy we are anyway in a provincial reality.
In more technologically advanced countries like Japan[2] suicide pact is carried out through Internet. The couple of aspiring suicides is formed accidentally on a web site which gives lessons on how to commit suicide. The two, a forty-six-year-old dentist and a woman of twenty-five years of age, decided “to test” together, personally, one of the suicides tecniques learnt on line.
[1] Those who are about fifty can certainly remember the nice song” Albergo a ore” where Fabrizio De Andrè, an Italian songwriter, tells about the surprise and sorrow of a hotel porter when he realizes the two young lovers, just gone up into the room, have committed suicide. Fabrizio De Andrè, in nineteen sixty-eight, had anticipated suicide culture with his song.
[2] The explanation of the increasing number of suicides, in Japan, is that it depends on a still unsufficient economic recovery, but actually in 1999 the number of people who committed suicide in that country was over thirty thousand, a record figure. The Japanese are worried about the high number of suicides on railway lines above all because every accident causes a block of the line itself for many hours; a repeated block causes an economic loss to the railway company and absurdly we could think that this way suicides, by increasing the economic crisis of that section, feed themselves. The remedy is quite Japanese: to set up big mirrors in the stations. On seeing their reflected image, psychiatrists assure that, those who intend to commit suicide think it over before throwing themselves under a train. 2 metre high and 1.5 wide mirrors were set up by the East Japan Railway in the stations of Shinjuku and Ogkubo.
Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci
to be continued in:
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 Mal de Vivre Twenty-first)
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)
6°)Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Sixth Part)
7°)Suicides (Le Mal de Vivre Seventh Part)
8)Suicides (Le Mal De Vivre Eighth 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.