Suicide and the Cults

Suicide and the Cults

The French kill themselves more than others… but it has nothing to do with the spiritual minorities

A study by Valérie Dole, member of the CICNS (January 2005)

Read also “Suicides in the large French companies”

It has become common among the adepts of anti-cultism to draw a striking parallel between the cults and suicide (1). Nothing like it for moving public opinion and feeding the psychosis. A few scattered cases are recycled for the needs of the cause, even if the link between this desperate act and membership of a spiritual movement is rarely demonstrated (Would Jérémie have killed himself if he had not been a member of the Néo-Phare group? Who could answer with certainty?).

Those who wanted to impose the thesis of collective suicide in the tragic events of which spiritual movements like the Davidians, the Peoples Temple or the Order of the Solar Temple were the victims are those who know best the truth of the facts and the reasons for the lie.

“The vice-president of the National Assembly’s study group on the cults, Jean-Pierre Brard, for his part asked for the postponement of Mr Tabachnik’s trial, so as to allow the courts to resume the investigation. ‘I think the file must be completely reopened,’ he said on France-Info, ‘that Michel Tabachnik’s trial must be postponed and that the resources in investigators must be committed to redo the whole judicial investigation.’ For the communist deputy-mayor of Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), ‘It is clear, there was no suicide, but assassination.’

On the subject of the murder of 16 followers of the Solar Temple, in the Vercors. source

In reality, does membership of a spiritual movement really play a role in the number of suicides in France today? A question it will be difficult to answer, so vague are the data on this taboo subject, in this country with Judeo-Christian roots where “taking away the life given by God” - one’s own, another’s, a foetus’s - is still a sin punishable by the fires of hell. It is only since the Second Vatican Council of October 1962 that a Catholic who has taken his own life has the right to a burial (2).

What do we know about suicide?

“According to the estimates of the World Health Organisation (WHO), in the year 2000 roughly 1 million people committed suicide and 10 to 20 times more made suicide attempts across the world. This represents on average one death every 40 seconds and one attempt every 3 seconds. Thus the observation must be made that there are more deaths by suicide than deaths caused by all the armed conflicts across the world.”

“Worldwide, 57% of suicides are carried out by people aged 5 to 44 (3), (with a peak from 35 to 44).”

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France is currently one of the industrialised countries most affected by suicide, and according to the 1999 WHO data covering 97 countries, France stands between 11th and 20th among the countries with the highest suicide mortality, with nearly 12,000 deaths by suicide per year.

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And even these figures are underestimated by about 20%, according to a report of the High Committee on Public Health.

“France occupies 4th place (in Europe) after Finland, Denmark and Austria (for the number of suicides per year). But France comes first as regards the number of suicides among the young aged 15 to 24.”

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“You threw your world in my face like a bucket of water, I will never find the way, I am lost. What do the people of your world possess, apart from their universe of sex? What do they possess inside themselves? I hear them talking at the entrances of the cinemas, in the railway carriages, in the cafés of the boulevards, and it is spite, petty judgements, a derisory and mediocre pretension. But why do they live? For nothing, to do as they have been told. (…)”

Valérie Valère, who took her own life at 21.

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“All or almost all have problems with the school system and above all with their family. Indeed, 17% are outside any family system, 61% judge that their life at home is tense, 44% unpleasant and 37% to be fled! To note: 12% of young adult suicide attempters have had homosexual relations (against 1.5% of young people of their age): rejection and discrimination are perhaps to blame here as well.”

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“In France, the National Observatory of Decentralised Social Action (ODAS) had counted, in the year 2000, some 83,000 children in danger, among them 18,300 recognised cases of ill-treatment (physical violence, sexual abuse, lack of care or food, and psychological violence).

It should be underlined that these reported acts are very often committed in the child’s own circle: the family, school, educational or leisure setting.

Ill-treated and abused childhood long remained a taboo subject that it was thought proper to conceal. Doubtless this form of social autism translated a will to mask one of the darkest faces of our social life.”

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France is also very badly placed, surpassed only by Austria and Hungary, for men aged over 75.

“Suicide is a major public-health problem, revealing of social malaise.”

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“In the world, the age group in which the most suicides are currently carried out is the 35-44 year-olds, for men as for women. This phenomenon is to be noted in France as well.”

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The principal risk factors are: psychiatric disorders, family and personal history of suicide and suicide attempts, early parental losses, social isolation (separation, divorce, widowhood), unemployment or the existence of significant financial factors, severe negative “life events”.

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“Suicide rates are higher among the unemployed (173/100,000), administrative employees of the private sector (86), agricultural workers (61), public-service employees (50). Suicide rates are in the middle range for skilled workers (43), primary teachers (39), shopkeepers (38), police and military (36), farmers (34), intermediate social-health professions (33), members of the liberal professions (33), liberal professions (29), commercial employees (27).”

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Suicide rates are also very high in the national police, where the possession of a firearm reduces the possibility of an attempt failing.

“Suicide rates are also high among drug addicts, alcoholics and incarcerated persons.”

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The highest suicide rates are found in the prisons, although few studies allow the number to be really assessed, the official statistics being subject to an implacable law of silence.

According to Bernard Stehr, pastor, chaplain at the Poissy central prison (Yvelines) and in the prisons of the Île-de-France for 20 years: “There are at least twice as many suicides as is said in the French prisons.” source

139 detained persons took their own lives in prison in 2003. France holds the highest prison suicide rate in Europe after Denmark and Belgium. Expert reports, recommendations and circulars have multiplied on the question. The latest opus to date, the report of the psychiatrist Terra, delivered to the health minister last December. It recalls this terrible reality: people take their own lives seven times more often behind bars than outside.

(…) For its part, the repressive penal policy embodied by Mr Sarkozy continues more than ever. So the figures remain: the number of suicides in prison has increased by 200% over the last 20 years. 60% of those who kill themselves are awaiting judgment, therefore presumed innocent, and a third of suicides take place during the first month of detention. In parallel, the prison population went from 47,000 in February 2001 to 61,000 in July 2003 (for a population of 60 million inhabitants, that makes nearly one person in a thousand in prison, the highest number since the end of the Second World War, with the occupancy rate exceeding 200% in 25 French prisons). The Committee for the Prevention of Torture drew its conclusion: “One is forced to observe the hiatus existing between, on the one hand, the intentions displayed by the French authorities and, on the other, the reality on the ground.”

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(dead link) see source

Among the serious studies that have been made concerning suicide, none mentions as a reason membership of a religion or of any spiritual grouping whatsoever, quite the contrary. These movements often give the people who belong to them the occasion to feel themselves members of a welcoming group offering an opportunity for sharing at a level often deeper than ordinary social relations. Everything would suggest that the recycling of a few rare cases by the anti-cult movements serves them only to pursue unavowed aims having little to do with the incriminated facts, their attitude tending rather to increase the suicide rate than to diminish it.

“Today one can observe on the ground the ravages of this new witch-hunt: people accused of belonging to a ‘cult’ lose their jobs, or in divorce proceedings lose their custody rights or simply their right to visit their children. Private companies whose only wrong is to have as director the member of a group labelled a ‘cult’ suffer considerable commercial harm. In extreme cases, people driven to despair by these campaigns, all the more insidious in that they are based not on precise criminal facts but on rumours or simple accusations of belonging to a group, contemplate suicide and sometimes act on it. (4)” Pierre Michel

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According to Émile Durkheim, who establishes a relationship of cause and effect between the forms of imbalance of the social bond and the suicide rate:

“The weakening of the confessional communities reinforces at once the need to know and the inclination to suicide.”

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His in-depth study of suicide, which remains a reference in the matter, tends towards conclusions opposed to those of the anti-cult movements and ought logically to defeat the law on mental manipulation which served to convict Arnaud Mussy:

“If one examines the influence of the different religions on the suicide rate, one realises that Protestants kill themselves more than Jews and Catholics. One might think that this relative immunity of Catholics stems from the dominant position of the Catholic Church in Europe. In fact, even as a minority, as in Germany, Catholics remain protected. The reason is that Catholicism is very structured, very hierarchical, very dogmatic. The individual has only a very restricted share of autonomy. Among Protestants, conversely, the direct relationship to God implies a total absence of hierarchy, an absence of dogma. Thus the Anglican church, more hierarchical, protects relatively better against suicide than the other Protestant churches.”

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“If [religion] protects man against the desire to destroy himself, it is not because it preaches to him respect for the person; it is because it is a society. (…) It is because the Protestant Church does not have the same degree of consistency as the others that it does not have the same moderating action on suicide.”

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Durkheim, Le suicide (1897), coll. “Quadrige”, PUF, 1985, pp. 149-173

France should take example from its island neighbour: thanks to “the Samaritans cult”, Great Britain today has one of the lowest suicide rates in Europe:

“There is no crusade of this scale without a founding apostle. That of the Samaritans is the Reverend Chad Varah. Considered one of the great personalities of the 20th century, he is to Great Britain what Abbé Pierre is to France.”

“The Samaritans is an association where all those in a state of moral distress are taken on the telephone and received. Its name sounds as familiar to British ears as Rolls Royce or Marks & Spencer, and for good reason: thanks to its network of 22,000 volunteers (men and women from 18 to 80, of all cultures, all backgrounds, atheists or believers of all religions) who run, 24 hours a day, some 200 centres covering the whole of Great Britain, the annual number of suicides has become, across the Channel, one of the lowest in Europe: it fell from 10,000 in 1953 to 6,000 in 1998 (that is, half the French figure).

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This study allows us to affirm that there are in reality fewer suicides in the spiritual movements than anywhere else, for these fill a lack by offering their members a privileged setting in which the values of love, peace and truth that ought to be the foundation of our society can take flesh.

See also our article on suicide in the large French companies

Valérie Dole is a member of the CICNS. An independent journalist, she has studied the New Spiritualities since 1977. Head of News at the CICNS.

(1) See for example this insidious article by Emmanuelle Lavignac, published in 2001: “In parallel with the increase in the hold of the cults, our societies find themselves in disarray faced with the increase in the suicide rate among adolescents. How, then, to apprehend the radicality of a cultic commitment or of a suicidal act?”

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(2) See Pierre Titeux’s article to “discover the official position of the four principal faiths” at source (return to the text)

(3) But what does one understand of death at the age of 6? “For the very young child, death is not irreversible,” explains Brian L. Mishara. Confronted early with the idea of suicide by the noisy ambitions of television, in cartoons for example, the child knows this reality from the youngest age, even if the word “suicide” sometimes means nothing to him before 7 or 8.

Bugs Bunny and Road Runner have shown many times the rabbit here, the coyote there, surviving a vertiginous fall from the top of a cliff or a pistol firing not bullets but a big “bang!” written on a pennant. The soap opera Virginie, inoffensive in appearance, evoked the suicide of a pupil at family viewing hours, and the tragic suicide attacks during the events of 11 September demonstrate that children easily have access to the reality of suicide.

The Quebec statistics, which the Coroner’s Office distributes with great delicacy, so disturbing is the subject, show a slight rise in the phenomenon over the years. In 1989 there were 3 suicides among 10-14 year-olds, against 8 in 1999 and in 2000 as well. The Canadian statistics, for their part, reveal 18 cases of suicide among 5 to 9 year-olds between 1970 and 1992. “If suicides are rare among children under 10, young children are capable of suicidal acts and voluntary self-mutilations,” noted Health Canada in Suicide in Canada, published in 1994.

source (return to the text) (4) Read on this subject “The death of Dr Jullien” at /library/cicns/jullien/ and see the film at http://www.coordiap.com/temo22.htm (return to the text)