What constitutes suicide

What constitutes a verdict of suicide?

For any death to be officially classified as a "suicide" officials must firstly view the circumstances of the death as being "suspicious".

Whenever a body is discovered, the Police and Medical Practitioners examine the circumstances with a view to deciding if the death in question is "suspicious"

This they do by looking for something called "commonense evidence" regarding...

How did he or she die?

Did he or she leave a suicide letter ?

What was his or her mental state?

Had he or she made any form of preparations? etc

This is where the problem begins to emerge.

If their "definition" of what constitutes a suspicious death does not fit into the perceived circumstances of death, then that death was not suspicious. If their "definition" does fit, then the death is (officially) suspicious and the case will be referred to the Coroner for examination. This means that at the end of the day, it is a question of each individuals "definition".

Once a death has been referred to the Coroner as suspicious. The Coroner will then hold an inquest to examine all of the circumstances of that death in order to be able to “classify” that death.

Since the only person who could possibly provide all of the required information is already dead - verdicts are largely based upon inference.

Coroners “infer” the cause of death by using common sense indicators…

Was a suicide note found?

What was the mode of death?

Hanging, Car Crash, Asphyxiation, in car etc.

Evidence of relatives

Was victim worried

Was victim depressed?

Was victim under some form of stress?

The history of the victim

Had this person attempted suicide before?

Did victim have emotional / financial problems?

There is strict legal criteria for a verdict of suicide to be arrived. Coroners need to establish suicidal intent. This will demonstrate that the intent behind the act, was unquestionably suicidal. On the face of it this sounds pretty straight forward. But in practicality, how is it possible to clearly determine such cases with 100% accuracy. How can one be 100% sure that a motor accident fatality really was an accident and not a suicide. Or an overdose was not in fact a suicide? The truth is that in any borderline decision there can be no 100% certainty. In such cases, verdicts of suicide are unlikely - even when the cause of death was suicide.

One UK study reveals that coroners are more likely to ascribe a verdict of suicide to deaths by hanging, trains and burns. Deaths where the person was found to have jumped/fallen or drowned were more likely to be categorised as open verdicts.

Men were more likely to use one of the methods likely to receive a verdict of suicide, while women were likely to use one of the methods associated with an open verdict.

Women in general, and in particular women from the Asian ethnic minority, were more likely to use burning as a method of suicide.

Reason behind bridge jump is still a mystery

Coroner not convinced she meant to take her own life.

An inquest into the death of a woman who drowned in the River Derwent has failed to solve the mystery of what led to her jump.

Georgina Walker was seen jumping off the Derwent Street bridge, near Exeter Place, on Monday December 12.

Her body was found three days later by a police diver.

At the inquest into her death at Derby Coroner’s Court yesterday. Derby and South Derbyshire Coroner Peter Ashworth recorded an open verdict because he could not be sure she had intended to take her life.

He added: “For some totally misguided reasons she decided to jump into the river to make some gesture.”

A post-mortem examination report said that Mrs Walker had been drinking on the afternoon before she died.

The 53 year-old, of Chaddesden, had phoned her husband, David, that afternoon complaining about painful sensations in her face - a problem she had experienced from on and off, for a year before her death.

She had been due to go to the hospital for a consultation. Mr Ashworth said that it was likely she had been suffering from trigeminal neuralgia, a neurological disorder that causes a lot of face pain.

A statement by a 16-year-old girl, who had seen Mrs Walker jump, was read out to the court. She had been walking across the bridge with two friends at about 6.45pm when she saw a woman sitting on the top of the bridge.

It said: “She then climbed down and when we looked over she was sitting on a lower ledge.

“She then said, “I’m going to jump if you come any closer”. Because she was slurring, I thought she had been drinking. The woman used her hands to lift herself off the bridge and went feet first into the water,

“She went under for about five seconds. She then shouted: ‘don’t worry I can swim’, and started swimming front crawl”

The girl said the woman had stopped swimming about a metre from the island in the river and started flapping in the water, but she could see bubbles coming up.

She had shouted out to her and offered her a stick. But the woman did not respond.

Another passer-by had called the police.

The police carried out an extensive search. Her body was found at about 10.35am on Thursday December 15, on the river bed, about 200 metres downstream from the bridge.

Mr Walker, of Highfield Lane said his wife, to whom he had been married for 26 years, did not suffer from depression and that her death had been totally unexpected.

Derby Evening Telegraph 26.01.06

I include this tragic report to highlight the plight of Coroners worldwide.

Question: If one thousand Coroners were given the facts of this tragedy, how many would record suicide, and how many would record an open verdict?

This serves to illustrate the random nature of individual ‘interpretations’ of the guidelines for registration of suicide as the cause of death.

Given the fact that individual Coroners may not agree on what is, and what is not, an act of suicide will inevitably have a major impact on the accuracy of suicide statistics.

Consequently, many people believe that there is a systematic bias about the certification of deaths by suicide and that there may actually be deliberate attempts to conceal or misrepresent suicidal deaths. Possibly with the very best motive of protecting the families of the deceased. Inevitably this results in a (possibly large but unknown) percentage of actual suicides being misclassified.

Misclassification

Given that to qualify for classification as a suicidal act the death must be above all ... 'suspicious'.

It may surprise some of us to know, but not all of us are physically capable of taking our own lives by our own hands. Many of us may passionately desire a merciful release from the pain of living but are unable to directly kill ourselves.

Accordingly some of us actively seek to 'provoke' our own deaths by employing 'other' means. We hear for example from America where people have been known to force armed police into a tragic shooting. This has even been given its own name: Death by Cop.

A less dramatic but far more obvious example of our third party (indirect) 'strategy' has to be road traffic fatalities.

It is totally impossible to know what percentage of road traffic fatalities could be 'self-induced fatalities' Suicides staged to appear as accidents.The resultant deaths would easily escape suspicion and so avoid classification as suicides.

Moreover

There are genuine reasons why some of us would wish to portray our suicides as accidents. For example; there are religious groups that would and do actually deny normal funeral rites to those of us that die by suicide. Insurance policies often do not pay the survivors any benefits beyond the premiums after a death by suicide within two years of taking out the policy, and they frequently pay more for a death judged to be accidental than for a suicide or a natural death. Altruistic gestures to protect our loved ones from stigma etc. All of these reasons (and possibly more) provide us with understandable explanations as to why we mask acts of suicide as accidents.

Having said all of that, even when a death is clearly regarded as "suspicious", it still needs to be established by a Coroner’s court that the actual cause of death was suicide.

Which is to say, that the death was the obvious result of direct action on the part of the deceased with the clear intention of self-termination. Or by direct inaction, for example failure to move out of the way of a moving vehicle.

It appears to be universally understood and accepted that there are invariably more suicides than are officially 'recorded'.

We know that an unknown number of suicides are misclassified as accidental deaths, open verdicts or simply left as undetermined because not enough is known.

There are wide differences in the rules or criteria used to classify a death as suicide in different places. Apparently, recent studies have shown suicide deaths underestimated by 3-24% with 10% being widely used as a general measure of undercounting. Stigma is said to contribute to the undercounting and variation in criteria. - Moscicki, Epidemiology of completed and attempted suicide, Clinical Neuroscience Research, 2001- The University of Newcastle estimate that undercounting could be as high as 30 - 50%

With all due respect, these calculations of undercounting are a nonsense. The number of 'actual' suicides is unknown (possibly unknowable) and simply adding an unvarifiable percentage as an updated estimate will still not provide an accurate figure. The simple truth is that the number of 'actual' suicides could easily be more than double those 'officially' recorded ... We simply do not know.