Suicide can also be an extreme symptom of mental illness, mismanaged medication, (including some type(s) of self-medication), or some of both combined, or maybe some form of brain injury contributing as well.
Unfortunately, there is (in the USA at least) a form of 'assisted' suicide, termed "suicide by cop". Also unfortunately, it seems there is a very simple way to get a Police Officer to 'end the pain'... get a toy gun and remove the marker indicating it is a toy, wave it around in public and wait for someone to call the Police, and when the Police arrive, point it at them, and move toward them, either before or during the pointing of what appears to be an authentic weapon at them. Whether such an action is deliberate, or the person 'unintentionally'/ignorantly creates such a scenario, the result is most often the same. In at least one case, a screwdriver was enough for an officer to shoot.
There have been recent cases of both Police shootings, and non-shootings when officer(s) do not fire, risking their life in the process. The assassination of two New York Police officers seated in their Police car have certainly caused problems. Enough of that topic.
The thought process of a suicidal person is clearly 'suspect' by the very action they are contemplating, so why would such a person even consider their effect on everyone and anyone around them? That would be rational thought attributed to a person who is clearly not thinking rationally...
An older movie dealing with suicide is NIGHT MOTHER where a daughter seems to have resolved her tendency toward self-harm, has a pleasant evening of helping her mother with ordinary household chores, and "'night Mother" are the final words spoken as she goes to her room, presumably to go to bed, but kills herself in her room instead. That movie matches real cases where a potentially suicidal person reportedly resolved whatever their issue(s) was, and showed what appeared to be calmness and clear thinking, as opposed to their previous turbulent moods and behavior. Unfortunately, the actual end result of that calmness can be an imminent suicide, or a recovery, and that calmness does not predict which will be the result.
Some suicides are very carefully planned, even to the point of pre-determining pretty much who will NOT find their body, and who probably will.
A friend of my parents-in-law had several of her neighbors and my in-laws trusted with a key to her house. Over the period of about ten days, she collected all but one of the keys, including my in-laws' key, who were probably her best friends of over a decade. Each of the people holding a house key had them for years previously, and either called her or received a call from her at least every week, and sometimes more than once a day. My Mother-in-law got concerned on the second day she had not heard from the woman and got no answer when she called, and called her neighbor to check the house... He saw her car in the garage, with all the doors and windows locked. They called around their circle of friends and discovered the house keys had been collected, except the one, and had the Police present when that person opened the door for them to do a "welfare check".
(Yes, Police will do that service when they are asked!) The people involved were expecting some sort of medical issue or a disabling fall, but not suicide, and the woman's death hit them all very hard. The Police did not allow anyone else in the house initially, probably because they were also considering criminal activity as a possibility...
Again, while that degree of planning seems to show clear, rational thinking, the end result was her suicide. It would take many pages to describe that woman's life, and how she came to that ending, so I won't even start. All that would be statement of facts, and not so much her motivation, since she did not leave a suicide note. The Police and medical examiner's investigation determined it was a suicide, not the result of criminal activity, even though she had several very expensive pieces of jewelry and a nearly new Cadillac (seperately) stolen in the preceding months. As far as my in-laws knew, she had never even mentioned suicide...
Those things taken together made her death that much worse on her friends and family... was it really suicide? Was everyone oblivious to signs leading up to suicide? Did she collect the house keys because the jewelry was removed from her house with no sign of forced entry, and she questioned her trust in her friends? Was her relatively recent boyfriend involved in some way, even though he was out of the country when she died? Did the Police and medical examiner do a thorough enough investigation? Those uncertainties hurt for a very long time, with no resolution.
As you can see, as bad as a suicide may be, it can be worse than you imagine.
On a slightly lighter note, (I haven't watched this movie yet, but do have the DVD), isn't the behavior described a lot like something from the cable series SHAMELESS?
In that series, a major plot arc involved how the family buried a deceased (natural causes) elderly family member in the back yard so they could continue receiving her Social Security monthly payments, and how they could deceive the investigator who insisted on meeting the old woman... and how they had to move her remains so a city utility company would not discover her remains, and what was done with the remains.
=========== Edit to add this recent news item ===========
article posted Jan 08, 2015
Hope Ruller Lay Dead For 14 Months While Daughter Lived Upstairs
clickable URL:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/08/hope-ruller_n_6438096.html
SUMMARIZING:
Police received a request from a relative to do a welfare check, and that led to the discovery of her body on Dec. 29, 2014.
The home was shared by the daughter and the daughter's adult son, and the woman was 94 years old. Her body was so decomposed, (dead/decomposing as long as 14 months, but never reported), an autopsy was unable to determine a cause of death. Police are treating the death as "suspicious", and the investigators are looking into the family's finances for a possible connection.
Does that seem at least mildly similar to the SHAMELESS cable TV series I mentioned?
I have been watching a movie about a writer whose books feature serial killers, and during a televised interview that includes another writer, he admits he has never interviewed a real serial killer, an makes a comment that "You don't need to make up anything, because life is so strange."
---> After this true story, the movie story leaving a body for one day seems very plausible.
=== End of edit ===
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