The 10 different types of suicide that exist

We all die sooner or later, but there are people who stop living because of suicide. While most people want to live the longer the better, people who commit suicide generally see it differently.

However, there are many types of suicide, as we will see, and this act can be classified in different ways. We will see that the motivation, the social factor, the method or the planning behind each type of suicide are particular in each case.

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Types of suicide according to the criteria used

In general, a person decides to take his life due to some state of despair and inability to move on with his life. They conclude that this option is a way to free oneself from some kind of suffering, although the vast majority of us know that there are always ways out and that life is a gift. If it is not living one way, we can live another.

If our way of life makes us deeply unhappy, we must change things so that things go differently

. Leaving behind nonsense pressures imposed on us by society, traumas from the past that should no longer be present or future,… in short, embrace life from another face. It is sad to see that there are those who choose one of the following 10 types of suicide.

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Types of suicide according to method

People who decide to end their life differ in the choice of method depending on how they want to feel more or less pain, motivation, intention, available means, etc.

The list of methods that a person can use to commit suicide would give for a list endless, and that is precisely why we have grouped them according to the harshness and the situation in which happen.

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1. Hard

There are very drastic and painful options that can end the life of a human being, and some people choose one of these options.

These include electrocution, the use of firearms, drowning, setting himself on fire, cutting himself with a knife and bleed, hang himself, crash the car, jump from a high place, etc.

2. Less harsh

There are ways to mitigate pain despite causing death. The strategy is the search for those forms that do not stimulate the sensitive nerves.

They basically focus on the abuse of chemicals, especially drugs. Fortunately, in many cases the person does not achieve the purpose of it and then has a second chance to live. There are many people who finally manage to find meaning in their lives despite having experienced a failed suicide attempt, because situations can be reversed.

3. Implausible

There are people who end their lives in an even more tragic way if possible. Usually these are people who suffer from psychopathic disorders and who cannot think too much about what they are doing. An example of this are people who suffer from schizophrenia and can even bite to death.

Types of suicide according to motivation

The reasons that can lead a person to take such a drastic measure as to end their life can be multiple. Below we present those that are most common among those who decide to commit suicide.

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4. Death

In principle, this is the basic purpose that is sought when one commits suicide, because it seeks not to be part of this world. They are generally people who suffer a lot and do not find a way to redirect their situation. It may be due to lack of social, professional, family fulfillment, etc.

We must remember that all the stimuli that surround us are all neutral. Ultimately we are the ones who decide what is terrible or what is something that we obviously do not like, but that we accept. Finding solutions to obtain different results is vital to have a very bearable and even pleasant life.

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5. Desperation for attention

There are people who are so misplaced in their lives and have such a lack of social attention that they no longer know what to do to appease their despair.. They do not know how to appease their discomfort and they do not know how to feel accompanied by other people.

In these cases, most of the time, you do not really want to end your life, although it would be collateral damage that could happen and that they generally accept.

6. Camouflaged

There are suicides that have been orchestrated by the same person who ends up dying but ends up looking like a natural accident or murder. This should not surprise us, because sometimes it is this last radical act that the person seeks to fulfill a goal that they had in life.

An example might be wanting to blame someone else. This can happen in cases of revenge for someone who believes that they no longer have much to lose (as in advanced cases of terminal cancer). It has also happened times that a person wanted to get money to her family through the collection of life insurance.

7. Revenge

There are people who are so emotionally tormented and feel so much resentment towards other close people that they decide to commit suicide to make them feel bad. It is a very twisted mode and is generally part of a conclusion typical of a person suffering from an affective-type paranoid-type disorder.

The final wish of the person who commits suicide, therefore, is for someone to feel guilty. He wants this person to suffer psychological harm as a result of he or she taking their own life.

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8. Altruistic

There are more or less spontaneous situations in which a person considers that he should do an altruistic act and act for the benefit of the group or another person. This type of death in which the person decides the fate of her in these circumstances would not occur if the situation was not extreme and the welfare of other people were at stake.

An example might be someone seeing that someone they love is imminently shot. The person could altruistically protect another by sacrificing himself so that he had a chance to live.

9. Life balance

Some people decide to stop living after having fought a very important struggle to stay alive.. Usually these are people who consider that they have lived their life and that now is the time to step aside.

It is related to euthanasia by its nature, and it could be the case of some terminally ill, severely disabled, or elderly people with very poor health or living conditions.

10. Collective or extended

There are situations in which a group of people may decide to commit suicide together. This can happen in extreme situations, such as war situations. A group may have been completely surrounded by the enemy and decides to end its life before falling into the hands of the enemy.

Another possibility is that a person decides to commit suicide and ends up dragging other people into the act of it. The nature of the phenomenon can be disparate, but it can happen for example in sects in which the leader decides that it is the way to follow and ends up leading the group to suicide

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Bibliographic references

• Counts, D.A. (1991) Suicide in Different Ages From a Cross-cultural Perspective, 215-230. In Life Perspectives of Suicide: Time-Lines in the Suicide Process, Antoon Leenaars, ed. New York: Plenum Press.

• Kral, M.J. (1998). Suicide and the Internalization of Culture: Three Questions. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35 (2), 221-233.

• Staples, J. and Widger, T. (2012). Ethnographies of Suicide: Anthropological Approaches to Understanding Self-Harm and Self-Inflected Death. Special issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 36 (2), 11-18.