Voltaire narrates that he knew a professional man, his brother, and the father of both, who all killed themselves at the same age, in the same manner.
Bucknill and Tuke give examples of suicide from hereditary insanity, and remark, “that they abound;” similar cases will be found described in almost all works treating of insanity.
Falret gives several cases, for example:─In one, a grandmother, mother, and grandchild, killed themselves. In another, five sons and one daughter, of a questionably sane father, all committed the act.
Griesinger gives us an example:─A man and his wife became insane, he hung himself and she drowned herself; one daughter poisoned herself, a son strangled himself, and another daughter threw herself off a house top.
In Lisle, on “Suicide,” ten marked cases are given.
Burrows narrates, at full length, the case of one family, as follows:─The grandfather hanged himself; he left four sons, one hanged himself, one cut his throat, one drowned himself, and one died a natural death. Two of these sons had large families; of the third, two children became insane, one died a natural death, the other made several attempts on his life, and two others drowned themselves, apparently sane.
The effect of mental agitation in a person knowing that he is the descendant of insane persons or of suicides, is worthy of consideration; to a well-educated man, what a “skeleton in the closet” to live with, must be the constant recollection of the risk to which hereditary transmission exposes him. Such a spectre may well refuse to be laid, and must be a fertile cause in the production of another generation of suicides.
Spiritualism.
There is yet another mental cause which is credited both with causing insanity and with causing suicide, especially in the United States. I refer to Spiritualism, in the modern acceptation of the title. It has been seriously discussed in America, whether or not a believer in spiritualism is not ipso facto mad (Buckham) but without going to that extreme point of view, it is most wise to bear in mind that many cases of lunacy and many suicides have been assigned to this cause.
The combined effects of a belief in the doctrine that it is possible in our bodies to hold communication with the departed, and of attempts to practise this system of intercourse, conjoined with the corollary that what spirits reveal is true, and so to say, inspired, has frequently had a most fatal effect on minds of a dreamy sort. I knew, myself, a most sane and sensible young medical man, who became imbued, through a spiritualistic father, with a faith in the possibility of obtaining information of a mystic and occult character by means of somewhat mesmeric proceedings; sad to relate, he very soon became mentally upset with a religious terror, and took his life, without having previously evinced any tendency to self-destruction.