Suicidology

[1] Every year, about one million people die by suicide, which is a mortality rate of sixteen per 100,000 or one death every forty seconds.

[clarification needed] During early Christianity, excessive martyrdom and a penchant toward suicide frightened church elders sufficiently for them to introduce a serious deterrent.

Suicide was thought of as a crime because it precluded possibility of repentance, and it violated the sixth commandment which is Thou shall not kill.

[citation needed] During this time, St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized that suicide was a mortal sin because it disrupted God's power over man's life and death.

[citation needed] Over the last 200 years, the main focus of interventions to prevent suicide has moved from appeals to religious beliefs (which do not always motivate people in contemporary society, which is more secular) to effort at understanding, and preventing the psychological and social influences that lead to suicide.

It is also a way for the person to explain, bring closure (or not), to give guilt, to dictate wishes, to control, to forgive or to blame.

Freud also believed that we had two opposing basic instincts—life (eros) and death (thanatos)—and all instincts sought tension reduction.

The definition he gave for suicide is a fatal willful self-inflicted life-threatening act without apparent desire to live; implicit are two basic components lethality and intent.

He also claimed that man created a god in order to be able to live without a wish to kill himself and that the only human liberty is to come to terms with death.