Mass suicide

Mass suicide is a form of suicide, occurring when a group of people simultaneously kill themselves. Mass suicide sometimes occurs in religious settings. In war, defeated groups may resort to mass suicide rather than being captured. Suicide pacts are a form of mass suicide that are sometimes planned or carried out by small groups of depressed or hopeless people. Mass suicides have been used as a form of political protest.
Attitudes towards mass suicide change according to place and circumstance. People who resort to mass suicide rather than submit to what they consider intolerable oppression sometimes become the focus of a heroic myth. Such mass suicides might also win the grudging respect of the victors. On the other hand, the act of people resorting to mass suicide without being threatened – especially, when driven to this step by a charismatic religious leader, for reasons which often seem obscure – tends to be regarded far more negatively.
During the Great Schism of the Russian Church, entire villages of Old Believers burned themselves to death in an act known as "fire baptism". This act took place over several decades. At least 20,000 Old Believers would die due to this practice.
In 19th century British Guiana, Awakaipu, an Arekuna shaman, established a settlement of indigenous tribesmen called Bekeranta (Berbice Creole Dutch meaning "Land of the White People") at the base of Kukenán-tepui. In approximately 1843 or 1844, Awakaipu instructed his followers to violently murder each other in order to reincarnate themselves as white people. Unofficial figures put the death toll at around 400, which included men, women, and children.
Yogmaya Neupane and her group of 67 disciples committed the biggest mass suicide (Jal-Samadhi) in Nepali history, by jumping into the Arun River (China–Nepal) in 1941.
On November 18, 1978, 918 people died in Peoples Temple–related incidents, led by Jim Jones, in Jonestown and Georgetown in Guyana. Using cyanide and tranquilizers, more than 200 children were murdered in the incident, and many of the elderly were forcibly injected with poison. Many of the adults seem to have died willingly, though this is contested and there was dissent. Jones declared the act a "revolutionary suicide", which had been used as a term within the group even prior to the massacre.
From 1994 to 1997, the Order of the Solar Temple's members began a series of mass suicides and murders, which led to roughly 74 deaths. The first occurred in Switzerland in 1994, followed by additional deaths in France in 1995, and finally a mass suicide in Quebec in 1997. The group was led by Joseph Di Mambro, alongside Luc Jouret. Farewell letters were left by members, stating that they believed their deaths would be an escape from the "hypocrisies and oppression of this world". Members believed that a death was a "transition" to another state of being.
In March 1997, 39 followers of Heaven's Gate died in a mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The group, led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, believed that through their deaths they were exiting their human "vessels", which would allow them to advance to the "Next Level" via a spaceship they believed to be following comet Hale–Bopp.
On March 17, 2000, several hundred members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in Uganda. While initially declared by the government and media a mass suicide, this was later changed to one of mass murder, due to the discovery of decomposing bodies nearby with signs of a more violent death. Anthropologist Richard Vokes, who wrote a 2009 book on the case following his own investigation, Ghosts of Kanungu, criticized the official interpretation of events (that it was mass murder); he argued that it had actually been a mass suicide and that the decomposing bodies were entirely unrelated to the group. John Walliss, in an analysis of the hypotheses relating to the group, viewed Vokes' theory as the most convincing.
In August 2004, ten dead bodies were discovered, all in a sleeping position, inside a two-story house located at Béchard Lane in the suburb of Saint Paul, Vacoas-Phoenix on the island of Mauritius. They had been missing for a number of days, and large loans had been contracted by some of the victims a short time before their deaths. Several of them were active members of the Eckankar sect. The main gate and all doors of the house had been locked from the inside, and the interior was in tidy order when police broke into the house.
In 2007, in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, a family of nine, all members of a novel "Adam's cult", committed mass suicide by hurling themselves under a train. Diaries recovered from the victims' home, the "Adam House", related they wanted a pure life as lived by Adam and Eve, freeing themselves from bondage to any religion, and refusing contact with any outsiders. After leaving Islam, they fell out of boundaries of any particular religion.
In 2018, eleven family members of the Chundawat family were found dead in their home in Burari, India. Ten family members were found hanged, while the oldest family member, the grandmother, was strangled. The bodies were found on 1 July 2018; in the early morning after the death. The police have ruled the deaths as mass suicide, with an angle of shared psychosis being investigated.
In May 2019, five members of a "medieval sex cult" were found dead in what investigators believe to be a mass suicide or consensual homicide-suicide. Two bodies were discovered in a flat in Wittingen and three more, including the leader, in a hotel near Passau.
In April 2023, 110 dead bodies were found in the Shakahola forest, near Malindi, Kenya. Rescued survivors stated that they had been ordered to starve themselves to death by Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, leader of the Malindi cult. As of June 2024, the death toll has risen to 448.