It is very poignant to discover that you have an ancestor who committed suicide. Even if it occurred centuries ago, we can still empathise with the desolation or pain that must have prompted this most extreme of decisions. In the past, suicide or felo de see was rated as unique among crimes as the 18th century solicitor general, William Blackstone, explained:

[A perpetrator of] suicide is guilty of a double offence: one spiritual – in invading the prerogative of the Almighty and rushing into his presence uncalled for – the other, temporal against the King who hath an interest in the preservation of all his subjects. The law has therefore ranked this among the highest crimes, making it a peculiar species of felony: a felony committed on oneself.

Taking your own life or ‘self-murder’ was perceived as very sinful because it meant depriving yourself of God’s greatest gift: life itself. Judas, the most famous person who committed suicide in the Christian Bible, was plainly identified as under the influence of evil. Hence suicide was regarded as immoral, ungrateful, and shameful. It represented a lack of self-control and, as a result, contemporary written sources often record that someone took their own life due to some sort of mental aberration in a ‘fit of temporary insanity’ or ‘when seized of an unsound mind’. Suicide was not talked about in public, and consequently some documents can be equivocal or vague in recording the cause of death because of the social and legal consequences for the victim’s family. If it could be hushed up, it often was. Suicide continued to be an illegal act in Britain until as recently as 1961.

Modern research shows that there are various risk factors that make you more likely to commit suicide, including having a history of mental disorders, or even a family history of mental illness. In particular, those who are severely depressed, suffer from prolonged and significant anxiety or are heavy drinkers are more likely to kill themselves. In historical sources, such as newspaper accounts or a coroner’s inquest, there may be clear evidence for an individual suffering from depression or mental illness, and he or she might even be described as having attempted suicide before. In contemporary records, depression is often described as melancholia, ‘low spirits’ or despondency.

People are more likely to commit suicide when faced with despair or a crisis which may or may not be related to mental illness. An individual’s personal circumstances may appear hopeless to them if they are facing financial ruin, social disgrace, or their affections for someone else are not returned. Dealing with a chronically painful or debilitating physical illness can also cause people to become despondent.

Another risk factor for suicide is having access to easy means to kill oneself. This is important because it explains why people pursuing certain lines of work are more likely to commit suicide. Farmers, for example, can easily obtain firearms or poisonous chemicals, doctors can access potent drugs, and military personnel have guns available. Finally, it has been known for centuries that men are more likely to commit suicide than women; they are more likely to be successful, and also more likely to employ violent means to kill themselves. In the 1880s, for example, four times more men killed themselves than women and similarly in 2020, three-quarters of all suicides in the UK were carried out by men.

The burial of suicide victims was the subject of special legal and religious consideration in the past. Traditionally, someone who took their own life was not buried in a churchyard but was interred without religious ceremony at a public crossroads with a stake driven through the body and no grave marker. This heartless custom was practised as recently as the early 19th century, and was not officially halted until the Burial of Suicide Act in 1823, which mandated that suicides be interred in the parish burial ground privately – in other words, without any of the usual rites of Christian burial such as a minister being present. Society’s disapproval of suicide mean that this burial had to take place in darkness between the hours of nine o’clock in the evening and midnight. The church might refuse to inter the body on holy ground, but churchyards and public cemeteries generally had a section of unconsecrated ground set aside for this and other purposes. In 1882, a further Act reversed this practice and allowed the body of a suicide victim to be interred with full religious ceremony in the same way as any other corpse.

A verdict of suicide, or attempted suicide, by a coroner had legal implications. There was punishment for the unfortunate offender if they survived, which usually might mean imprisonment or being confined to an asylum. However, importantly, there were legal penalties for the victim’s family too if a relative killed themselves. All the victim’s goods and property could be forfeited to the state, with any will left by the individual being set aside, often sending a grieving family immediately into poverty.

Yet whatever the law or the church formally dictated about the handling of suicides, local communities or individuals might choose to do things differently. So although until 1823 suicide victims were rarely entered in parish burial registers, some clergymen exercised discretion on this point. Yet right up until 1882 you may find that some suicides are not recorded by the church in burial registers so this can pose a problem for family historians trying to find the death of an ancestor.

Of the various means available, the commonest methods for suicide since Victorian times have been hanging, drowning, poisoning (including overdose with medicines) and cutting oneself with a knife or razor to bleed to death. However, in the 1920s a new technique arose and became a dominant method for five decades: suffocation with domestic gas supplies.

The agents used for self-poisoning were determined by what was most readily available in the era concerned. So in the 1860s when poisoning represented only about five per cent of suicides, it was easy to buy hydrochloric, carbolic and oxalic acids from chemists shops as well as opium. These substances were used around the house for various domestic purposes, so could be purchased quite innocently, they were cheap, and so they tended to be the poisons of choice. In the 1960s, barbiturate overdose was common, but by the late 20th century when poisoning accounted for over 20 per cent of suicides, overdose with medicines such as painkillers and antidepressants was the most frequent type of self-poisoning.

Official figures suggest that the number of suicide cases on the home front in Britain fell significantly during both world wars. However, it is possible that suicides in the arena of war – where men certainly had easy means of taking their own lives – went undetected or unreported. Some cases of ‘suicide’, of course, were heroic acts in which an individual knowingly gave his life to save others. Private William McFadzean of the Royal Irish Rifles, for example, threw himself on top of grenades that fell into his trench in 1916 in order to save his comrades and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Suicide could also be used as a weapon: Japanese kamikaze pilots deliberately flew their planes loaded with explosives into allied ships. Yet for veterans who survived the world wars, their memories and experiences were, sadly, sometimes the cause of suicide many years afterwards.

Figures from 2020 show a rate of suicide of 10 per 100,000 people in England and Wales, compared to about 26 per 100,000 in 1863, and an all-time high of over 40 per 100,000 in 1934 in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

So suicide is significantly less common these days than it was for our ancestors. This is probably because there is now greater support for people who may be at risk of suicide such as those with mental illness, debt and long-term illness.