Suicide is contagion, an epidemic, a contagious paralysis.

In Suicide and Mass Suicide, Joost Merloo describes suicide by way of “collective psychotic behavior. He reports of the Greeks of Miletus: “Young girls began to indulge in all kinds of ecstatic and orgiastic bodily movements which eventually led to epileptic convulsions and suicide.”

Merloo also considers the Holocaust: “When one hears the description of many of the six million Jews going to the gas chambers, weak, paralyzed, or in a religious ecstasy, one must accept the existence of a mass-suicidal drive.” Yet, he establishes, suicide and mass suicide are never simply the effect of one cause. Individual guilt, failure, and fatalism may intermix with collectivity.

Merloo reports a phenomenon during Nazi occupation. Fear of captivity took two forms. Some “became reckless despite all warnings.” “Even more astonishing was the passivity of people who should have attempted to escape because they knew the Gestapo was after them. It was as if terror and death had an uncanny hold on them. Many of my Jewish patients who could have escaped remained at home passively waiting for their executioners.”

However, in the face of such circumstances, Merloo also wonders whether suicide may be the last true freedom.

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Joost Merloo, Suicide and Mass Suicide (Grune Stratton, 1962), 88-91.