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Suicide note

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Suicide
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A suicide note is a message left by someone who later attempts or commits suicide. It is estimated that 12-20% of suicide victims leave a note.[1] However, incidence rates may depend on race, method of suicide, and cultural differences and may reach rates as high as 50% in certain demographics.[2][3]

Uses

According to Dr. Lenora Olson, the most common reasons that people contemplating suicide choose to write a suicide note include:

  • To ease the pain of survivors by attempting to dissipate guilt
  • To increase the pain of survivors by attempting to create guilt
  • To set out the reason for suicide
  • To gain sympathy or attention
  • To give instructions as to disposition of remains

Rarely, those who have committed a crime or other offence will confess their acts in a note.

The most common reasons people contemplating suicide fail to write a note are:

  • They are functionally or completely illiterate, or uncomfortable with written language.
  • They have nothing to say or nobody to say it to - common with respect to the elderly or those without surviving loved ones.
  • They feel they cannot express what they wish to say.
  • Their choice to commit suicide was impulsive, or at least hasty enough that there was no time for a suicide note.
  • They hope the suicide will be written off as an accident or homicide (common in those who wish to be buried in consecrated ground or who hope their families will be able to collect on insurance, for instance).
  • They simply do not wish to write about their choice.
  • They have no access to anything to write with or to write on before suicide.
  • Believers of some philosophy, such as solipsists, may believe that their death signals the end of everything around them.

Famous suicide notes

The following people have left famous suicide notes:

  • Getulio Vargas - lawyer, politician and Brazilian president (1930-1945; 1950-1954) who used his suicide and suicide note (the "Carta Testamento") as a political weapon against his enemies.
  • Lisandro de la Torre - Argentinian lawyer, politician and senator who fought against his government's corrupt officers during the "Década Infame" (Infamous Decade), the 1930's. Finally, abandoned by his allies and believing his struggle to be lost, he committed suicide, leaving a note describing the desperate situation he was going through.
  • Leandro Alem - Argentinian lawyer, politician and senator who took his own life in 1896 after being betrayed by his fellow Radical-party members, who gave themselves to the fraudulent regime then in power in the country, at least according to his view. He left a note denouncing them and his own nephew and heir in the leadership of his party, the future president Hipólito Yrigoyen.
  • Eduardo Chibás, Cuban politician and radio celebrity, killed himself during the broadcast of his programme making his speech during it a kind of oral suicidal note, protesting against the widespread corruption of the reigning regime.
  • Roger Angleton - Murderer and brother of famous bookmaker Robert Angleton.
  • J. Clifford Baxter - Enron Corporation executive.
  • Leslie Cheung - Hong Kong actor and musician who suffered from clinical depression.
  • Kurt Cobain - Lead singer of Nirvana. The note gives a message to his widow, Courtney Love, and to his daughter.
  • Clara Blandick - U.S. film actress, most famous for playing Auntie Em in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Her note stated "I am now about to make the great adventure"
  • Ida Craddock - Facing prison in 1902 for sending through the U.S. Mail sexually explicit marriage manuals she had authored, Craddock penned a lengthy public suicide note to her readers condemning Anthony Comstock, sponsor of the Comstock Act under which she was convicted.
  • Dalida - Popular French singer. She wrote: "Life has become unbearable ... forgive me."
  • "Dead" - Lead singer of the black metal group Mayhem, whose suicide note famously read, in part, "Excuse all the blood."
The German poet Heinrich von Kleist's suicide note from 1811 is a farewell letter to his sister Ulrike.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "AIM Report: Critiquing Berman's Report on Foster". Accuracy in Media. 2001-06-01.
  2. ^ "The significance of suicide notes in the elderly". 2002-05-01.
  3. ^ "Incidence of note-leaving remains constant despite increasing suicide rates". Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. 2005-04-01.
  • Mark Etkind: ...Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes, Riverhead Trade, ISBN 1-573225-80-0
  • Lenora M. Olson, The use of suicide notes as an aid for understanding motive in completed suicides, Proquest/UMI, ISBN 0-542162-85-7
  • Famous suicide notes - dying words of famous people
  • Suicide note
  • Sam Paul: Why I Committed Suicide, iUniverse, Inc., ISBN 0-595326-95-1
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