I could tell you, for example, that about one million people will take their lives this year, that the world suicide rate has increased 60 percent during the last 45 years. I could tell you that in the United States, suicide kills more people every two years than the total number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. I could tell you that in Connecticut, which has among the lowest rates of suicide in the nation, many more people committed suicide in 1998 than died as a result of AIDS, murder or injuries from firearms. You wouldn't know it from the media. Many U.S. newspapers, including The Courant, have a policy of not reporting that deaths are suicide unless the act is in a public place or involves a public figure.
Men die from suicide at four times the rate of women.
A 1660 law in Massachusetts Bay, for example, required that suicides be buried at a crossroads. Such bodies were often buried with a stake through the heart to prevent the soul from wandering. A French law of the same era required that the corpse of a suicide be dragged through the streets, before it was thrown on the town dump or into a sewer. In Britain, until the late 1800s, suicides, by law, had to be buried at night. I could tell you that in 1969, the year we landed men on the moon, suicide was still a crime in seven states.