MEDICAL ANALYSIS

Hokitika Guardian, 14 May 1932, Page 6

MEDICAL ANALYSIS

CAUSES OF SUICIDE

HYPNOTIC INFLUENCE AT WORK

The regularity with which the Sydney Bridge has been used by would-be suicides prompts the question of what actuates them in their desire to leave worldly cares behind. An authority classifies it under ten headings.

The general reasons ascribed are that the suicides consider themselves unfit to live, that they are ru ned morally or financially, that they are a source of danger or contamination to the community, that they may avoid constant persecution, that voices Jell ■them to commit suicide, that various delusions compel them to sleeplessness, mental confusion, constant worry and, finally, that others might be saved.

Suicide may be accidental or intentional. A maniac or general paralytic may accidentally kill himself while trying to perform some impossible feat, whereas another patient may actually take his life when his sole purpose is to draw attention to his case, or to attract sympathy. Nerve exhaustion cases are particularly liable to commit suicide. A certain number act purely on impulse. Suicide in some form suggests itself and it is immediately carried out. Fits of passion are responsible for other suicides.

METHODS OF SUICIDE. V The methods employed vary. The average person who is mentally affected prefers some method which specially appeals to him. For instance a man has been known to swim a river to get to a railway line in order to throw himself before a train. It is not suprising that suicide should suggest itseif to the troubled mind. It is quite natural that the troubled person should take such steps. One authority states that a doctor should worry that by asking a depressed person if he ever contemplated suicide he may be making the first suggestion of suicide to the patent’s mind. Not only is there no such' risk, but it is the duty of the doctor to talk to a patient on his question. If the doctor explains that the desire to commit suicide is quite a common sympton with depression and tell the patient that, 'lie will relieve his patient. Suicides are most likely to occurr between five o’clock and ten o’clock in the morning, for between these hours the melancholic is most depressed and must be "kept under constant supervision. In nerve exhaustion eases the latter part of the day is just as dangerous from a suicidal point of view'. It is probable that the majority of< persons who commit suicide do so when in a confused condition of consciousness — in fact, almost in a drealn state.

THE GRAFTON BRIDGE. Air W. J. Poyntdn, presiding at an . iriquekt on Mfiu?wfi-i’st- threw, himself over the Grafton Bn-idge, remarked that the pity of it was, now' that someone ham committed suicide in that fashion, probably someone.else Would follow' because, as lie said, there Wits a certain hypnotic influence on people in a certain state of mind in the fact of someone committing suicide A few years previousjyrhe. had conducted an inquest and "only a short 'time later a person found dead under similar circumstances was found to have secreted in his hatband a clipping of the newspaper report of the inquest. Only a week after Air Poynton bad related ;the incident another suicide threw himself over the bridge and secreted in bis hatband was the clipping of the inquest at which Mr Povnton had made the remark.