Suicides on the Increase

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SUICIDES ON THE INCREASE.

There is something radically wrong in modern society: while wealth and luxury are on the increase, happiness and contentment are on the decrease. Inventions and contrivances for saving labor abound, yet there was never a generation who worked so persistently and unremittingly as the present. While in civilisation and respect for the outward decencies of society, we have wonderfully progressed beyond our progenitors, it is doubtful whether in true morality and purity of the inner life we have not greatly deteriorated. The duties of life, among those nations who claim to be the most highly civilised, involve an undue strain on the intellect and thinking powers, without correspondingly nerving the physical system or cultivating the moral perceptions. Our seminaries of education resemble hot-houses, in which the feeble plant is artificially stimulated, rather than the open garden, where it is nurtured by the grateful breeze, and fed by the brilliant sun light. On leaving school, the precocious youth, at an age when he ought to be playing at ball in the open fields, is placed in “a situation,” where, seated on a stool nearly as high as himself, he commences to earn and accumulate money, instead of being engaged in such pursuits as would lay a substantial foundation for permanent health and long life. From that time forth the whole existence of the individual is one continuous struggle between an ever restless mind and the frail tenement, wasting away with its efforts to support the incessant tension to which its nerves are subjected. Rest and repose the aching brain will not, and the jaded body cannot, have. Disease and pain seize upon the body, and make it still more incapable of fulfilling the innumerable behests of the energetic brain; ennui in its most fearful form assails the individual, who, with his moral perceptions as dim as his physical system is weak, is urged at the dictate of his restless intellect into the abyss of suicide.

We have been led into the above train of reflection by the perusal of a recent work by a French gentleman of eminence, which contains the most astounding disclosures respecting the increase and prevalence of self-destruction. In France, we are told, from 1836 to 1852 inclusive, there were 52,126 suicides, or a mean of 3066 a year; the numbers rising steadily from 2340 in 1836, to 3575 in 1852. From 1827 to 1830, the mean number has been only 1800 a year. Before 1836, the proportion was one suicide for every 17,693 inhabitants; in 1836, it was one for every 14,207; and in 1852, it had risen to one in every 9340. In great cities the proportion of suicides is far larger than in the country districts. Paris enjoys an unenviable preeminence in this respect. No less than one person in every 2221 commits suicide every year. New York ranks next—sed longo intervallo—her proportion being one in 7797. That of London is one in 8250; Philadelphia, one in 11,873; Boston, one in 12,500; Baltimore, one in 13,750. In Prussia, Austria, and Russia, the proportions are proportionably smaller—showing that the most civilised nations are most given to suicide, and vice versa. Singular to say, the months of summer are those in which most cases of self-destruction occur. In June and July the number of suicides is nearly double those occurring in November and December. It would seem that the heat is apt to make men mad, as well as dogs. The mass of suicides are men of middle age—though cases among the young are rapidly increasing.

Some people have an idea that all who put an end to themselves must necessarily be laboring under aberration of mind when they do so—but repeated facts, no less in modern than in ancient times, prove the contrary. From that of the noble old Roman, Cato, to the last instance paragraphed in the papers, there is plenty of evidence that there are many men so dead to hope in this world, and so fearless of consequences in any other, that they deliberately take an irreversible plunge into futurity.

The conclusions to be gathered from a careful perusal of the statistics and facts bearing on this subject are—

1. That suicides are on the increase generally, but specially in France; 2. That the suicides in France greatly outnumber those of any other country in the world; 3. That they are not always attributable to mental affections, not yet to physical sufferings, though suicides from these causes constitute a special branch of medical science; 4. That they are in ratio with the increase of civilisation and the diffusion of a certain kind of education—that kind which taxes the intellect too heavily while leaving the physical nature uncared for; 5. That they spring from moral and social causes chiefly—of course always excepting special disease—and are therefore to be dealt with and destroyed by a healthier system of public education and sounder views of social life. The extreme development of the nervous system, to the loss of muscular power and physical harmony generally, has tended to the increase of suicides; the over-cultivation, too, of the intellectual faculties in the young has been another fertile source of the same evil. The best and truest checks, therefore, to be given to this sad practice are—the returning to a more natural and more healthful system in the nursery, the school room, and the forum, so that children and youths may no longer die from over-excited intellects, nor men cut short their days from social weariness or artificially induced disease.