On the other hand, Holland, Norway and Finland, show an increase in the number of marriages, and a tendency to a lower suicide rate.
The presence of children to married life affects the suicide rate; they restrain the mother more than the father, in married life and widowhood; whilst they have the contrary effect on divorced persons.
In France, for example, the suicide loss among the married, where there are children, is 205 per million men to 45 per million women; where there are no children, it is 470 per million men to 158 per million women; and among widowed persons, where there are children, the rate is 526 per million men to 104 per million women; and where there are no children, it is 1,004 per million men to 238 per million women.
Bertillon remarks that widows are much less anxious than widowers to marry again; that many widows become so to their peace and happiness, and the isolation and bereavement of widowhood are usually overbalanced by woman’s noblest virtue and care, maternal love; where there is no such outcome needed, suicide fastens its fangs on the mind.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
INSANITY IN RELATION TO SUICIDE.
It is not my intention in these pages to enter into a lengthened discussion of the once much debated question as to whether suicide be invariably a proof of pre-existing insanity.
It is sufficient for my purpose that a certain number of suicides are definitely insane, and that in these cases the act has been committed in consequence of some delusion from which the patient was suffering. Such a one may have been insane on a single point, and no other; or he may have been entirely demented.
But there certainly are other cases, in which no symptoms of mental disease can be discovered; either in the history of the deceased, or in his recent actions, appearance, or conduct. “There is no lunacy present where the sense of weariness of life is in exact relation to existing circumstances; where obvious moral causes exist which satisfactorily account for the deed; when the resolve has been fixed deliberately, and might have been abandoned had the circumstances become altered; and in which we discover, after honest and impartial search, no other sign or symptom of mental derangement. When a man prefers dissolution to a miserable or contemptible life, or one full of mental and physical ills, Morality and Religion must charge him with the deed; Insanity need not claim him for her own.”
The instinct of self-preservation is not so strong as to prevent men altogether from being tired of life, and seeking their own deaths. They may have exhausted all the available sources of pleasure, their business may have gone wrong, or their honour may have suffered, poverty and loss of position may be at hand, their difficulties may seem entirely beyond their power to surmount, and they calmly and deliberately arrange to leave behind them a life which has become unbearable; such an act may be unwise, and is certainly presumptuous, but it has in it no sign of disease.