When you fall asleep, and your body becomes motionless and unresponsive, you know for a fact that your mind temporarily vanishes. But, in fact, you yourself have had plenty of direct experience of your own mind going absent at a time of pseudo-death. True, absence of evidence is not entirely reliable as evidence of absence. When, now, you observe that an individual's body no longer behaves in any way at all-it neither acts spontaneously nor reacts to your probes-you have very good reason to suppose there is no longer anyone at home inside. As a human, with a ‘theory of mind,’ you expect to be able to infer another person's mental state from their outward behaviour. But it is perhaps something you can deduce from circumstantial evidence. When your body dies, what happens to your mind? Once you are no longer an actor in the public realm, can you no longer be a thinker or feeler in the private one? This is not of course something you or anyone else can discover from direct observation. For there is, of course, another meaning of ‘self’, and hence, the probability that self-killing will have a still more significant result. By applying this to your own case, you would realize that you yourself once dead will no longer participate directly in the lives of others.īut we must go deeper still. Frans de Waal describes how, when a group of chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo were shown a video film of the alpha-male, Nickie, who had died by drowning 2 years earlier, his erstwhile rivals panicked as if they had seen a ghost. This is a fact of death that non-human animals with complex social lives can also understand up to a point. But the most salient change is in the dead person's role as an actor in the physical or social world. Bodily death, however caused, has effects that anyone can see and take on board. Perhaps, every suicide is at some level a ‘copy-cat suicide’ (which I'll return to later in the paper.)īut, now, to go deeper: when you think ‘I can kill myself’, who is this ‘self’ and what do you imagine will result from ‘killing’ it? Again, Stengel implies that early humans would have understood the inevitable consequences of self-killing from observing the killing of others. Humans as a species are notoriously imitative. In a typical human community, where suicide is already prevalent, you will have heard tell of others who have successfully killed themselves. But, for this, you might not have to look far. You might still want confirmation that it can really be done. By imagining yourself in the victim's place, you would see that what happened to him or her by accident could happen to you by your own intent. Instead, for most of human history (until the advent of modern murder weapons such as guns), a more likely model for suicide will have been accidental death: falling from a cliff, drowning in a lake and bleeding to death from a cut. The fact is most of the ways you might observe to be effective for killing another-be it with teeth or claws or fists or clubs-would not be feasible ways for you to kill yourself. Stengel implies that early humans acquired this from observing how animals and fellow-humans could be killed. Clearly, it has to begin with imagining the act: you have to have a picture of how it can be done. It's simple to say, it's a discovery made by every growing human, but the thought of killing oneself will usually have complex layers. I explore how this played out historically, and what remedies, if any, were available. Yet killing themselves would usually-if not always-have been a maladaptive act. When times were hard, some individuals would have been bound to see death as an attractive option. However, from then on, suicide would never have been far from people's thoughts. I argue that the human mind must have had to evolve to a critical level of sophistication before anyone could arrive at the idea that ‘I can kill myself’. The purpose of this paper is to consider just how radically life changed. It can be assumed that life has never since been the same to him’.

Here's how the psychiatrist, Erwin Stengel has put it: ‘At some stage of evolution man must have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-men but also himself. Then, at some point, the idea must have dawned.

While not every ancient human would have had first-hand experience of assassination, everyone would have known and talked about it. First, of course, killers of animal prey for meat, but also killers of other men and women.

Human beings have always been murderers, killers of other living beings. In an evolutionary context, the term murder is not inappropriate. Suicide used to be called self-murder, felo de se.

Easy ways to kill yourself